


Reputation

by iska_stel



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Album: Reputation (Taylor Swift), Angst, Canon Compliant, During Canon, F/M, Gale sucks in this one, Hurt/Comfort, Katniss still doesn't understand feelings, Minor canon divergence, Slow Burn, but she's certainly Trying, vengeful!Katniss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 27,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24852730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iska_stel/pseuds/iska_stel
Summary: Who has a bigger reputation than the girl on fire? (And why is the boy with the bread such a threat to it?)Or: Katniss gets stuck in her feelings to the tune of Taylor Swift's reputation for about 15ish chapters.
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen/Gale Hawthorne, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Comments: 45
Kudos: 62





	1. ...Ready for It?

**Author's Note:**

> I ordered a boxed set to celebrate tBoSS and watched Miss Americana while I was waiting, and by the time I sat down to reread the trilogy I'd been listening to reputation on loop for days on end and now here we are! Enjoy :)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Touch me, and you'll never be alone._

**…Ready For It?**

_It’s not like she’s going anywhere. We’ll deal with her in the morning._

I knew he was a killer the second I found his face in the crowd on Reaping day. Not that he would be swinging a knife around the arena with a pack of Careers, finishing stray tributes when it’s his turn. But that he would kill me, that these Games would kill me, even on the slim chance that I made it home. Which would be worse, having to kill the boy with the bread, or watching his face show up in the stars one night with no warning?

At least he’s made it easier, this way.

Despite all my misgivings, despite throwing him into a vase after his stupid confession,  despite the bitterness of our last conversation before we were thrown into the arena, some part of me had begun to trust the boy with the bread. However much I disliked it, something had been building. He and Haymitch both were trying to get me back to District 12, then.

Or so I thought.

Maybe I was too bitter for Haymitch’s taste — for both of their tastes. Peeta asked for separate training, hadn’t he? And it’s a clever strategy, tricking the simple-minded girl into thinking you’re in love with her so she won’t see it coming when you throw a knife in her back.

Very clever. What a pair they make.

Except…

I stare down at the pot of medicine in my trembling hands, still waiting for the adrenaline to fade. Not that we’ve spent much of these Games together, but I haven’t seen any silver parachutes fall for Peeta. And mine fell only after I’d seen the tracker jacker nest, after the plan had started brewing. I can’t help it. It looks to me like Haymitch’s stamp of approval.

But maybe this is just another facet of their plot. Make Katniss drop a nest on Peeta’s head, give Lover Boy permission to kill his darling. It would only make him more devastating, wouldn’t it? The Capitol loves the Katniss that Peeta has designed. The girl who haunts the boys of District Twelve, holding for ransom all the hearts she’s stolen. Oblivious and unattainable, distant and desirable. How their hearts burn for Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire.

Yes, the Capitol loves me only because Peeta convinced them to. But he doesn’t need anybody to be adored. He doesn’t even have to try. Not at all.

I wonder about the girls popular Peeta was friends with back home. Are they still madly in love with the baker’s boy, now that they’ve seen how ruthless he is? Are they haunted by the fact that they might have pined after, held hands with, even kissed the charming boy with a killing streak?

I wonder if it’s something borne of the Games, or something he’s kept brewing beneath the surface all along, something he’s been saving up on the odd chance his name gets drawn. We all have a plan on Reaping Day. Gale and I share the same one every time. It only makes sense that others would too.

_Gale_. Gale will murder Peeta if he’s the one to make it home without me. He’s probably already on the warpath watching whatever they’re showing back home, whatever scraps of these awful Games he manages to see.

It makes sense now, Peeta and his rooftop philosophy. He doesn’t want to be a piece in the Capitol’s, because he’s too busy playing his own.

But then I think of the bread and I get confused all over again. He’d been in my dreams too, those last few nights before the games. Nightmares of watching the boy with the bread die. More than I’d like to count.

In all my introspection, the Careers have set themselves up a camp with sleeping rolls and a big campfire. Hunters don’t have to be worried about who might see their smoke. Nonetheless, one of them sits upright against a tree opposite mine, keeping silent watch.

I stare down at the cluster of sleeping tributes. Tributes, not children. Not them. Not anymore.

Which one’s Peeta?

Will he be the one to kill me?

_ Can he? _

I promised Prim, I know. And it’s a promise I still plan to keep. I haven’t given up yet. But if I’m to die in this arena, I hope that he’s the one who has to do it. He might be haunting my thoughts right now, from the second we stepped into this arena, from the second he threw me those scorched loaves. But if he’s going to follow me like a ghost, I’ll show him a phantom.

I see him then, watchdog of the hour, flames flickering against his skin. His expression’s unreadable, but there’s a softness in his face so unlike the other Careers. So deceptive.

I narrow my eyes from my tree-bound nook. _Touch me, and you’ll never be alone_ , I think. I’m not sure if it’s a dare or a promise, but I mean it. If he’s the one to end me, I’ll haunt him worse than any horror these Games might bring.

His chin jerks up then, and somehow he finds my eyes in the dark. Maybe he heard my voice in the back of his mind. Maybe he knows now that this arena will kill him too, even if he makes it back home.

Good.

I hope they eat it up in the Capitol, the poor star-crossed lovers forced to fight to the death.

I hope it hurts them in ways they’ve never ached before.

I hope it haunts them as much as it does Peeta.

He tears his eyes from mine, and I start to move, grabbing my knife and climbing up that last branch to the tracker jacker nest. When my serrated blade meets the bark I pause. A moment of silence for the boy with the bread, for whatever might have been, for any kind thought of him that’s ever gone through my head.

“Let the Games begin,” I whisper into the darkness, my voice masked by the beginning trills of the Panem anthem, and then I begin sawing.

As soon as I get my hands on that bow, there’s an arrow with his name on it.


	2. End Game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You and me we got big reputations,  
>  And you heard about me,  
> I got some big enemies._

**End Game**  


_End game_.

It’s what I think once Claudius Templesmith’s voice cuts out of the arena, once Peeta’s name flies from my lips before my hands can cover my traitorous mouth, once I realize what this means.

That we can make it. Both of us.

Us two and our big reputations as star-crossed lovers. We have to be the fan favourites, right?

Peeta’s alive. Alive. Both of us.

We can both go home.

_End game._

It’s what I think on the way to the Cornucopia, while I peer through the bush, watch Foxface dart out for her pack before anyone else takes the chance, grit my teeth before I race out to snag my own. 

Peeta needs this, and if he needs this, then I need it just as much. I need us both to get home. I can’t lose the boy with the bread, not now. Because if he dies, I’ll never go home, not really. I’ll spend the rest of my life in this arena trying to think my way out.

Our way out.

_End game._

It’s what I think when Clove’s knife catches my brow, when the cold shock and the blunt force have me skidding in the dirt, toppling over. What I think when she pins me down, trailing her blade feather-light across my face. It’s my mantra, over and over, my prayer. And for once mine comes true.

It’s what I think as Thresh races away with two packs instead of one, as I scramble in the opposite direction, as I hear Cato’s desperate pleas and the cannon's boom that follows only moments after he stops begging.

It’s what I think even through the dizziness, while I try to keep my footing steady on the rocky river bed, when I tumble into the cave, chest heaving, head pounding, black dots trickling into my vision, when my head hits the ground and my eyes become too heavy to open again.

I swear, I think it even after I’ve blacked out.

_End game_.

It’s what I think with despair, exhaustion, without a trace of hope. When we avoid eye contact, avoid each other entirely, act like we were never a team at all.

Shouldn’t we still be a team? 

I don’t want to touch him. Not like this. It aches to have our fingers intertwined, to don our big, happy, madly-in-love smiles as we step off the train.

I don’t want to miss him. It aches how much I already do, even while we’re still holding onto each other, even as Haymitch reminds me Peeta will be the rest of my life now, even as we become next door neighbours, as close to each other as we are far.

I don’t want to hurt him. It aches how much I already have, even though I’m sure he aches even worse. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Not Peeta, not Gale, not Prim, not my mother. It would kill them to know the truth I know, the truth Haymitch reminds me of every time I look in his hardened eyes.

_End game._

I’m done with games. I don’t want to be a piece in them anymore. I’m not trying to play. But it’s not up to me. It never has been.

I know this was a shock, I want to tell him. A big bang, a full-body blow. Neither of us can ignore that, neither of us can bury it. No matter how much I want to. No matter how good I am at burying things.

And I can’t let him go, even as he drifts further and further from me. Even if we didn’t have a romance to play at for the cameras, I need him.

_ I need him. _

Us star-crossed lovers and our big reputations. Doesn’t he see our enemies are bigger?

Maybe there’s no such thing as an end game. Maybe there never was.

But what I wouldn’t give to be allowed on his team again.


	3. I Did Something Bad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _They're burning all the witches even if you aren't one,_  
>  So light me up, go ahead and light me up.

**I Did Something Bad**

Narcissists and playboys. They’re all I ever see anymore.

In the arms of newly-appointed Head Gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee, I spin across the dance floor of my engagement party. Extravagant, gaudy, exhausting. Capitol through and through.

But my face doesn’t tell him this truth. I lie in silence, act my part of blushing, bubbly, bride-to-be, and I play them like the Capitol quartet’s elegant violins. How they hum and trill and sing for my pleasure. All of them but Snow.

I cannot lie to him, no matter how hard I try. We did agree not to, after all.

But I can lie to Plutarch, and he can lie back. That he’s recovered from the punch-bowl debacle, that the _flavour_ of the Quarter Quell hasn’t yet been determined, that he likes the girl on fire so much that he’ll have her mockingjay caged in his custom-made watch.

Am I all they ever think about anymore? Me and my rebel bird and my _fiancé_?

I catch Snow’s eye, and in seconds I’m the girl on fire again, flames on my skin, as red-hot as my painted lips. Nervous as I always am under his gaze.

I divert my eyes, glance back at Plutarch’s watch, where my bird is held captive.

At least I’m not in a cage. Not anymore.

I stiffen with this realization, just as Plutarch bids me good night and Peeta steps in to take his place.

I’ve done something bad. Worse than bad, I understand, staring into Peeta’s eyes. They’re clouded, a note of concern in them. I’m in danger, he’s in danger, our families are in danger. Probably our whole district. He sees something there, deep behind my eyes, but doesn’t see what the something is. Not yet, not tonight.

I’m the girl on fire, my name first on Snow’s list, a stake already built for me to burn at, I’m sure. It doesn’t matter what I might try to convince him of. His mind is made, and I’m something to be extinguished. Destroyed. Maybe I am. Who’s to say?

What I know for sure is there’s no question anymore, no chance of hope. I know where I stand now.

And I’m so relieved.

Peeta’s hand is firm but gentle on my waist, and I’m relieved that we’ve reached some level of normalcy. That we can touch without having to hide our separate flinching. It will make it easier to break this news to him.

That I’ve done something bad. Just how bad the thing I’ve done is.

But not yet, not tonight. It’s our party, after all. We should enjoy it.


	4. Don't Blame Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Don't blame me, love made me crazy_  
>  If it doesn't, you ain't doing it right.

**Don’t Blame Me**

“Don’t blame me.” I try to make it come out like a snarl, the kind of sound a wild dog might make. The only creature I know of that still puts Gale on guard.

Instead it comes out like a pup’s whine, pathetic rolling from my lips. It feels like falling out of the trees I escape in when the packs roam our woods, knocking the air from my lungs, making my chest ache.

The look on his face doesn’t help. But he was the one who wanted to argue in the first place. I try not to feel too bad for him.

“Don’t blame you for your little love story?” Gale echoes bitterly, mockingly. “All that star-crossed bullshit had nothing to do with you, is that it?”

His knuckles are white, his hands curled in fists so tight it makes his arms shake. If he’s going to punch something, I hope it’s a tree, and not the face of the boy we discuss but won’t name.

“I didn’t have a _choice_.” This time my voice is fierce. A proper growl. Too much time spent with his fiery temper and it ignites in me a spark to match.

“You didn’t _choose_ to kiss him every five seconds?”

My blood is already pumping hot through my veins, but the accusation brings an extra burst of heat to my cheeks.

“It’s more complicated —”

“You didn’t have to kiss him that much,” he snaps. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Some of the wind is knocked out of him now, his head dropped to watch his toes scuff the dirt. He’s angry, but more than that he’s hurt.

Can’t he see that I’m hurt too?

My voice is softer now, gentle. “All I thought about in that arena was coming home.” _To my family. To you_ , I think, but I hesitate before I can say it out loud. It would be cruel to say, especially when I’m not quite sure what it would mean coming from me. “I never wanted any of this.”

“It just feels like I’m being toyed with,” he says, shaking his head sourly. “Like I’m a plaything for you to use in your off-time. When you’re not preoccupied with the cameras and the dresses and your _fiancé_.”

I hate the way he spits that word out.

Would he feel better if he knew how little time I spend with that fiancé of mine? We still see each other, of course, especially now that we’re not trying to avoid each other all the time. Afternoons in one of our Victor’s Village homes or the other. It’s amazing how much I manage to feel like a normal person with sun slanting through the window, just watching him paint.

So maybe I do spend more time with Peeta than with Gale. Maybe if Gale wasn’t always picking fights he’d find me in the woods more often.

“I’m an idiot for ever thinking things would change between us. Not in the way I want, anyway.” He says it with a sense of finality that makes my insides twist, my throat tight.

I never wanted anything to change. I only ever wanted them to go back to normal.

Why can’t anything go back to normal?

Maybe if I didn’t need him so much, things could be normal again. Maybe if afternoons watching him paint were enough. Maybe if I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night shaking from nightmares, pacing until my mind quiets down, wishing I could be next to him in the dark paradise of that cave. To wake up with any feeling besides dread or weariness.

But I don’t think Gale wants to hear about all the complicated thoughts Peeta brings to mind.

“You don’t know what it’s like in there, Gale,” I say softly, still fighting the tightness in my throat. And he doesn’t. He doesn’t know the way it makes you crazy, the way it pushes you to do things you’d never consider otherwise. “You have to cross some lines to get out of there alive.”

“You didn’t just cross a line, Katniss!” he snaps, and I flinch. I’m not sure what does it, the note of desperation in his voice or the fact that he’s given up my nickname. “You went too far.”

“It wasn’t up to me!” I half-lunge at him, another hot burst of anger firing up in my chest. How many times until he understands? Will he ever understand? “Wouldn’t you have done the same if it was you in the arena?”

The accusation cuts through him, but he only falters for a moment, and then he’s shaking his head again. “I wouldn’t.” Not a moment wasted to consider it. His mind’s already made up on this, on me. Always already made up. “I would never put on a show like that. My survival wouldn’t be for their entertainment.”

_But that’s what the Games are,_ I think, and even my thoughts sound desperate. But there’s no point arguing. He doesn’t get it.

Maybe I should have spent my afternoon with someone who does.

He’s given up on me now, given up on the argument, given up on anything else I might say. At least it makes it easier to let some of the cold seep back into my voice.

“If you wouldn’t do whatever it takes to be with the people you love, maybe you’re not loving them right.”

His hands are back into fists again, trembling at his sides. I expect anger when I look up, fire blazing in his Seam-grey eyes, but there’s only pain.

Is this any surprise by now? I’m like that stealthy patch of poison ivy in our favourite spot of the woods, tricking him into a place where his heart might be safe, and forsaking him to days of suffering. I’m no meadow daisy, swaying to his breeze. He’s had enough misadventures in the brush to know better. And by now he should know _me_ better.

Maybe we both should.

“Whatever, Katniss,” he says with a sigh, already turning away. He’s officially given up on me. He means it this time. “Just remember that you’ll be playing this part for the rest of your life.”

This is not news to me. Haymitch has drilled it into my head enough times now. But it hits harder coming from Gale.

He takes a few steps away from me, pauses, and then throws the last of it over his shoulder. Just to make sure it stings.

“I hope you’re happy with it.”


	5. Delicate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Is it chill that you're in my head? 'Cause I know that it's delicate..._

**Delicate**

By the time night falls, nothing can put me back to sleep after the nightmares. Not the gentle rocking of the train en route to the Quarter Quell, or the last of the tears shed in place of my perfectly-planned goodbyes, or even the peaceful acceptance of the fact that I’ll be dead in days.

I pull a robe over my sleep clothes and pad into the hall. No one would be roaming the compartment at this hour, but I don’t want to wake anyone who might feel obligated to linger. Dinner was hard enough, and I’d only stayed long enough to stomach half a bowl of soup.

I can feel the ache of it now, though, the scant food I’ve managed to hold down today. I can’t even remember breakfast. But I smell something down the hall, something warm and sweet and inexplicably homey, and I follow the scent and the flickering light seeping into the hall until I find Peeta alone in the television room, cradling a drink in his hands.

He might be the only person I can stand to be with right now.

His fingers are tap-dancing a rapid beat on the rim of his mug, but when I step into the doorway they fall still. He shuts off the screen and turns to me, his face blank but not unkind. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asks, and I watch his eyes flicker over my face.

I shake my head, and when he opens his arms I move straight into them.

We hold each other for a long time, my arms wrapped tight around his neck and his lips pressed against my hair, and it’s only when I can’t resist anymore that I pull away.

“What’s that smell?”

“Warm milk. With honey and spices,” he says, eyes roaming my face carefully, daring a half-smile. “It’s good.”

But I only half hear him, eyeing the box of tapes Effie had procured for us months ago. Right at the top of the pile, begging to be watched, sits a tape with  _FIFTY, HAYMITCH ABERNATHY_ printed on its side in thick block letters.

“You’re plotting with him too, aren’t you?”

I jolt, unaware that Peeta had followed my line of sight, unprepared for an accusation even as gentle as this.

“He’s my mentor too,” I say, quiet but firm. We’ve completely detached ourselves now, staring each other down. “I’m allowed to strategize with him.”

Peeta drops his eyes, shakes his head, lets out a small, breathy laugh. “You’re impossible, you know that?”

I cross my arms and stare harder.

“I know you don’t want to hear it, but you already know how I want this to go.”

“Well,” I say, unable to keep the childish petulance out of my voice, “I don’t care.”

He stares at me with a furrowed brow, quizzical, and I can’t blame him. The sentiment of _I don’t care what you want, I’ll keep you alive whether you like it or not_ is a laughable one. Especially when it’s a sentiment we share. So it’s only a few moments of hard staring before we’re both laughing at the grim absurdity of it all, and it feels good to be able to laugh at something so terrible.

Almost as good as having his arms around me again. There’s been so much distance between us since Gale’s whipping, since Peeta became personal trainer to Haymitch and I. Only a taste of what it once was, when we first came home, but too harsh a reminder even then.

“I can’t make you any promises now, can I?” Peeta’s laughter lingers, the leftover smile still clinging to his lips, not yet shaken by the gravity of our situation. I’m grateful for it, happy I can still feel the same tug at the corners of my mouth.

“No.” I’m still smiling as I reach around him to take his mug, finish the contents, and return it empty to him. “But you can make me a drink.”

By the time Haymitch finds us watching his Quarter Quell victory, I already feel better. Blame it on the warm milk — Peeta was right, it’s delicious — or being next to someone who understands precisely the horrors we’re about to walk into, or knowing that Haymitch has made his own promises to me.

Blame it on all three. At least I have something like hope again.

I’m in awe of him. There’s no other word to describe it.

In awe of his hands, his mind, his _care_.

I wish they hadn’t scrubbed the gym so clean.

I’ve seen that image of Rue in her wildflower shroud enough times in my own mind, but to see him recreate it, give it all the devastating, tragic beauty it deserves? It would have broken me down, given me a nice round zero for my training score, I’m sure of it. But it would have been worth it.

They’re right, of course. Effie, Haymitch, even silent Cinna and Portia. This is not for the best, this small act of defiance. But it only makes me more sure than ever that I must protect Peeta. Not just in the arena, but for the few days we have left outside it.

“I guess this is a bad time to mention I hung a dummy and painted Seneca Crane’s name on it,” I say, soaking up all the horrified attention that immediately turns on me. But the only attention I mind is Peeta’s. His lips fight to hide his smile, and there’s something like wonder in his eyes, and now that I see it on him I’m sure it’s exactly how I looked only moments ago.

I coax his smile out of hiding with one of my own, and I’m surprised when the thought bursts into my mind of taking it for myself, of kissing it from his mouth. Am I even allowed to think like that, to have him in my head like that, given the circumstances?

But then I realize that that’s no one’s decision but my own. So I hold him in my mind, as delicately as I hold the thoughts of the kisses that set my insides on fire, and when I wake up beside him the next morning, I’m only a little surprised by the lack of nightmares.

Our day on the roof is the best I’ve had in a year.

More than, actually.

My last true good one was Reaping Day, I’d decided. The first half of it, anyway. One last peaceful morning in the woods with Gale before everything changed forever. For me, for him, for us.

For everyone.

But I don’t think of Gale that day. Not while Peeta and I work through a feast more extravagant than any Reaping Day scraps in District Twelve. Not while we rope the forcefield in on the games between us, tossing a stray apple back and forth. Not while he draws one, two, five portraits of my face, not while I tie a flower crown of rooftop perennials like I used to do with Prim, not while I doze in his lap with his fingers threading through my hair.

Not when his hands go still, and he says, “I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever.”

Not when I pause to stare at him for a few long seconds, or when I say back, “Okay.”

Not when the smile breaks through his face, or when he asks, “Then you’ll allow it?”

There aren’t many promises we can make each other now, Peeta and I. But this is an easy one.

I don’t think of Gale when we watch the soft sunset sky from the Capitol penthouse, a view that eclipses any forest high-ground I could ever find. I don’t think of him when the last of the orange fades and I take Peeta by the hand and lead him to my room. I don’t think of him when Peeta hesitates at my door, swallowing hard as I cross the threshold, waiting for him to follow.

“Stay with me,” I whisper, squeezing his hand.

I don’t think of Gale until I’m lying face-to-face with Peeta, committing his face to memory in the dark while the Capitol lights sparkle outside our window, when he says, “I don’t want to share you. I don’t _like_ sharing you.”

Even then, it takes a second before Gale cuts through the Games, the Capitol, the days and nights with Peeta by my side. But he doesn’t stay long. Not when I’ve accepted my lost goodbyes, not when I know that’s a story ended, not when I have Peeta in my bed.

“You don’t have to share me here,” I tell him, and when I kiss him I’m the girl on fire all over again, warmth flooding my stomach, crawling from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head.

It’s long and slow, the kind of kiss we haven’t shared since the first arena, and it tastes so much better in a warm bed where the only hunters are the two of us, seeking only the taste of the other’s lips.

When he pulls away, he looks at me for a long time, brushing his thumb against my cheek before drawing in close again to press his lips to my forehead. “Good night, Katniss,” he says, wrapping an arm around me and letting his head fall to the pillows beneath.

Before I even shut my eyes, I know I’ll only dream of him.

I am married. I am pregnant. I am more tragic than I’ve ever been before, the star-crossed girl on fire, doomed either to die as a childless mother or live as a spring-green widow.

As always, Peeta has made me something far greater than I could have imagined.

On the eve of the Games, I am almost giddy. It’s an alien feeling, and so wrong to have in this of all places, but it buzzes beneath my skin with more electricity than District Twelve’s fence has ever held.

I refuse to let go of his hand, dragging him into my room, insisting that he doesn’t need to stop in his when there’s a perfectly good shower in mine. I only let go after he’s convinced me he needs to wash off all the makeup to feel like a person again, and even then I’m tempted to hover.

Somehow I manage to turn my back while he towels off and redresses.

I attach myself to him the second he crawls into bed, and this time he doesn’t pull away. Whatever hesitation he had the previous night has been alleviated, and now the hunters are ravenous.

His lips work hungrily against mine, and his hand fists the fabric at my hips, and my fingers slip under the hem of his shirt to graze the hard-soft skin of his stomach and the coarse hair just above his waistband.

It gives us both pause, my self-indulgence. He freezes, one hand still bunched in my sleep shorts and the other grazing my jaw, and I draw my hands back an inch, searching his eyes, wishing for him to understand just what he’s done for me. What he’s done to me.

I am not just a rebel’s martyr, I’m the Capitol’s saint. I’m his masterpiece, a work he’s dedicated more hours to than any of his careful brushstroke paintings or rooftop sketches.

I’m _his_.

I don’t know what it means, only that it’s true, and somehow he must read this in my face, because he takes my hands in his and presses them back against his skin, and I’m free to roam the planes of his chest.

Our breaths are laboured and intermingling, our hands in competition over whose can cover more skin, and when a helpless sigh slips from my mouth into his, he slows.

“We should stop,” he says, breathless, pressing his forehead against mine until I open my eyes.

“Should we?”

He swallows hard, and I can see both his Adam’s apple and his resolve waver. But he is kind and he is careful and he loves me, and we both know this as well as we know that I can’t make those decisions so easily.

I don’t know what feelings I hold for him. I don’t have a word for the need to protect him and stay with him and not forget the taste of his lips. But he’s always been so much better than me with words.

“It’s… delicate,” he says, tracing my jaw with his thumb. “I don’t want it like this. And neither do you.”

I swallow my disappointment, knowing he’s right, knowing this is one of his last chances to protect me, knowing I can’t deny him that. And when I wake from my aimless, meandering sleep to find him with his eyes closed, eyelashes fluttering from a place in his mind that I can’t see into, I wonder if it’s a pleasant dream. If it’s a dream of me. If it’s the kind of dream I’ve had of him these last few nights.

And I wonder if there was no Gale, no Games, no Snow, no Capitol — if he was mine, only mine, all the time — if those would stay dreams. If what lives in the small space between Peeta and I would still be so delicate.

But the morning of the Quarter Quell, I wake unrested and unanswered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was my favourite one to write so far, but then again I'm a slut for Everlark fluff/angst :' ) Thanks for reading!


	6. Look What You Made Me Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me,  
>  I'll be the actress starring in your bad dreams._

**Look What You Made Me Do**

Gnarled, malevolent jungle roots bite at my hands, scratching up my skin while I claw my way to the tree, storm clouds circling like vultures overhead. My head pounds hard and heavy, booming like the death-canon of the Games. I can’t tell if it’s more from blood loss or anger, but I know I would give anything to set the whole arena ablaze.

I hate them, all of them. Gloss and Cashmere, Enobaria and Brutus, for killing Wiress and Chaff and Seeder and anyone else in this arena worth trusting, despite us all playing nice on that interview stage. I hate Haymitch and his sour, ominous warnings, strong-arming me into alliances with people I never trusted, never wanted to trust. I hate Finnick and Johanna for worming their way into a group that should have only been Peeta and I.

I hate them for separating me from him.

But it’s myself I hate the most. For letting them separate us, for letting Peeta into the arena twice, for dying without the reassurance that he’s still alive to make it home for the both of us.

Even more than Snow, it’s me I hate. And that only makes me hate him more.

He’s played us all for fools. We are all pieces in his Games, accessories to his perfect crime, this glorified, glamourized annual massacre of his.

He will outlive me, I realize then. The girl on fire will burn out long before President Snow. Martyr or not, I can’t destroy him.

I won’t get to.

My arm gives out on my way over a gargantuan root half my height, and I stumble over it, dropping to my knees and elbows on the ground. Peeta had us crawl like this while we were training. I can still make it.

The world will move on from Katniss Everdeen, from the star-crossed lovers, from the twisted tragedy of these Games. They will find new tributes, new cast members for their gory drama, new victors to parade around as if it’s a joy to survive these Games. Games that go on long after the tributes have left the arena.

I thought I understood, those last few days before the Quarter Quell, not wanting to be a piece in his games. But I didn’t, not really. Not until now, with gold wire and a trusty bow and a few spare arrows strapped to my back, and a trail of red marking the way I’ve come.

My heartbeat is a flicker now, as rapid as it is weak, and the life-giving drumbeat echoes in my head, in my arm, in every inch of my body. My underclothes are streaked green and brown from the jungle floor, my knees and elbows aching from the rough terrain.

It was my mistake to trust anyone in this arena besides Peeta. Anyone at all besides Peeta.

But it was their mistake to trust me, too. Finnich and Johanna and Haymitch and all the rest. But Snow’s the biggest fool of all, if he ever trusted me to be his chess piece.

No, he should know me better than that by now.

My arms shudder as I push myself up off the ground slowly, slowly, one hand connecting to the tree to keep myself upright. I’m half-slumped against the bumpy green husk, watching its spidery upper limbs twist and bend beneath the storm clouds. And just past the storm clouds, right there in the sky, a faltering sliver of the forcefield, twinkling like the north star.

I wonder if Snow has nightmares like the rest of us. Will he now, after I ruin his Games a second time? I’m sure I’d be the star of that evening show, too.

I coil the wire around my arrow, eyes locked in on the wavering spot overhead, the chink in the armour. It’s the only thing I see, even past the black dots creeping into my line of vision. _No more nightmares,_ I think. _Not for me._

This is what comforts me, notching my arrow and dreaming up Snow’s night terrors, praying for them, even. It would only be fitting, since he’s ensured mine every night for the last year.

Except for when Peeta’s there to chase them away.

_Peeta._

He is the last ache in my chest, my head, my bloodied arm as I pull back my bowstring. This will hurt him, I know. But better hurt than dead. He deserves life more than any of us.

 _Don’t hold it against me,_ I think, watching my arrow fly, the wire trail behind it like the tail of a shooting star.

It’s then that Haymitch’s words sink in, really sink in. _Remember who the enemy is._

Even if I had more than a few moments to live, I’d forget him no sooner than he’ll forget me.

It’s my last thought as I’m thrown to the ground, as the pieces of the arena begin to crumble around me, falling as hard and fast as midwinter snow.

 _Everything comes down to Snow,_ I think, waiting for the shrapnel to pin me down, tear me apart, to make the girl on fire burn out once and for all.

At the end of it all, everything comes down to Snow.

He made me do it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! <3


	7. So It Goes...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You did a number on me,_  
>  But honestly, baby, who's counting?

**So It Goes…**

It’s so dark I can’t see my fingers in front of my face, dank air pressing cold and wet around me. But there’s warmth to my right, a hand weaving into mine. His footsteps are heavy and uneven, the underground terrain too wet and rough for his prosthetic to traverse easily.

I squeeze his hand hard. They won’t take him away from me this time.

We’re in a cavern. Maybe a chamber not unlike the caves from our first Games, albeit a little bigger, deeper. Underground. Or maybe a subterranean shaft not unlike the one my father died in.

He draws in a breath, and everything stops while I strain to hear his voice, to hear anything from him. I can’t remember the last time I heard him speak.

The lights go on, and the barren walls and echoing ivory floor are blinding. My entire body itches, shrieks at me to cover my eyes to shield the burning light, to shield myself from what comes next, but I resist, resist, resist, clamp my hand even tighter around his. My eyes simmer, streaming from the ache, but through the wetness I can see the room around us. Sterile, bereft, completely empty except for Peeta and I and a flock of mockingjays perched on a bone-white tree.

Their heads snap as one, their hunters’ eyes locking in on us, and some invisible force drags him away from me, pries my vice grip from his hand until the bones crunch and spatters of blood dot the pristine floor.

I scream, but there’s only silence.

I blink, and he’s cuffed to a hospital bed stained with blood and feces and whatever else oozes from the no-longer-living when they breathe their last. He kicks and howls and thrashes so hard his restraints draw fresh blood around his ankles and wrists. Like sharks to the carmine traces, all the mockingjays dive for him, but only one of us is unable to reach him.

I bang on the glass wall that separates me from him, but if they hear me they ignore me. They go for his eyes first, each of the birds’ beaks a different knife from Clove’s collection, and I pound and kick and scream and scream and scream but they’re singing too loud, Rue’s four-note melody no longer a song of safety or home-time. The only noise that rises above their distorted chorus is Peeta screaming, wailing for help, begging to know why I left him behind.

_Why did I leave him behind?_

I wake with a raw throat, my mother and Prim already gone. My own screams had to wake me this morning.

The only place I see Peeta now is in the dark. Not next to me, holding me when I wake, chasing the nightmares away with his lips. He is the nightmares, the star of the show, all I see when I close my eyes.

They weren’t able to extract him, they tell me. He’s in the Capitol’s custody, they say. What they don’t say is that they didn’t try hard enough. Only that they tried. They say it like it means something, like it might mean anything at all.

I hate them for it, and the hate burns until it’s the only thing I feel at all, and then I burn out and the numbness crawls back in.

District 13 can’t be as miserable as President Snow’s personal torture chamber, but I feel just as trapped here. Stuck in an underground cage, the same kind of lightless shaft that swallowed my father whole, the same kind of place I try to rescue Peeta from every time I fall asleep.

It’s the perfect place to be held hostage by all my worst feelings, by thoughts that venture into territory even darker. Snow couldn’t have designed a better prison himself.

I didn’t realize how fragile my own mind was until I didn’t have Peeta to hold the pieces of it together, and it makes me wonder how he held on when I was so cold to him. How he holds on now.

Because there’s no way he’s not. He has to be holding on.

_He has to._

Does he break down the same way I do? Has he already been broken beyond repair? Does he hate me for leaving him in the arena, for not making sure he was the one to reach safety? I wonder if Snow suspected this all along, how the stage of his grand show would fall apart before his eyes. Was that crumbling of the arena just the beginning of all his pieces falling into place? Stealing Peeta for his own, knowing nothing could break me more?

On the worst days, I hide in bed, burrowed deep into my thin district-issued blanket, where I know no one will try to rouse me. I screw my eyes shut until my head pounds and think as hard as I can of every good memory I have of Peeta. Bread, dandelions, lamb stew. Rooftop, sunsets, a single pearl. I clutch this last physical remnant of him and I replay them over and over, in as much vivid detail as I can muster, and sometimes I can pretend that he’s next to me. That I’ve gotten him alone, at long last. That I can feel his arms wrap around my waist, pull me closer, into a place that’s warm and secure and safe.

I lose myself in these sacred moments, basking in the memories of even more sacred ones. The kiss in the first games that lit a match inside me. The afternoons spent watching him paint. The night before the Quarter Quell, tangled in my bedsheets with him, his skin half-painted with the lipstick I hadn’t completely washed off.

I save the quiet morning hours, when my mother and Prim are both too busy to stumble upon me in our shared quarters. These are the times I’m allowed to cry, to soak my thin pillow with secret tears. So it goes.

When my tears dry, when I’m too tired to shed any more, I stare up at the ceiling, waiting for an answer I’ll never get to a question I’ll never stop asking.

They’ve both done a number on me, but which of them has destroyed me more? The boy with the bread, or the man who took him from me?


	8. Gorgeous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Ocean blue eyes looking in mine,  
>  I feel like I might sink and drown and die.  
> _

**Gorgeous**

Finnick doesn’t eat with us anymore. I can’t tell if it’s Peeta or Johanna he distrusts more, but our dinner table isn’t a bet worth taking.

I can’t blame him.

No one’s seen Peeta since that first night he was out and about for dinner. Not in shared quarters, anyway. Haymitch still visits his white-walled room every day, watches him through the glass until he’s too weary to handle the heartache, and then he finds me.

I haven’t asked after Peeta since he told me what a piece of work I am. Between Haymitch and Johanna, I don’t need anyone else to remind me. But either Haymitch hasn’t noticed my pointed disinterest, or he doesn’t care, because he still manages to hunt me down every day for a fresh update.

“It’s a lot for him right now, but it’s part of the process,” Haymitch says the day after Peeta’s cafeteria venture, to which I say nothing.

“It’s a good thing they left the cuffs on him. He shouldn’t even be allowed out of medical,” Gale says while he escorts me to the dining hall.

“It’s been a bad couple days, but he’s trying,” Haymitch says, as if he thinks Peeta’s absence might bother me.

“It’s good that you eat with me and Johanna. That’s all I’m saying,” Gale says, glued to me on the way to the cafeteria, through the line-up, all the way to our seats.

“It’s not going to help him any, being strapped to a cot for the rest of his life,” Haymitch says, striking the wall, more distressed than I’ve ever seen him. I almost say something, but the words catch in my throat.

“It’s a non-essential meeting. I can get out of it,” Gale says, giving me a hard, heavy look while he hangs back by the cafeteria doors.

“It’s fine,” is all I say, because there’s nothing else worth saying. Peeta hasn’t left his room in three days, and I still have Johanna to protect me if a fight breaks loose. She’d at least help drag me back to our room after the fact.

Naturally, this is the night Peeta joins us for dinner.

Our group is smaller this time around, since Gale is occupied. Finnick of course refuses to bring Annie around until Johanna apologizes and promises to tone it down, meaning we will likely never share a meal with him again. A few of the other seats are taken up by soldiers whose faces I recognize but names I don’t know, but it’s nice to have some familiarity without any kind of conversational obligation.

It’s almost comfortable, and then Delly Cartwright’s squeaky voice cuts through the dining hall clamour and my stomach drops to the floor.

“Mind if we sit with you?”

Her face is as bright and smiley as ever, one arm extended in a jovial wave and the other resting on Peeta’s arm. This shouldn’t be a surprise, nor should it bother me. Peeta has brought the same three things to dinner both times now: handcuffs, attitude, and Delly to smooth it all over. But there’s still a bitter, prickling feeling that claws its way through my ribcage and up my still-aching throat, seeing her able to stand next to him, to touch him.

What a privilege to not be the object of sweet Peeta Mellark’s homicidal desires.

“Why not?” Johanna finally says, her smile wide and cocky, though her eyes linger on me. “Who doesn’t like dinner and a show?”

One of the soldiers shoots her a look, likely annoyed at her provocation considering he might be the next one to have to haul Peeta off of me. She ignores him, and I ignore her.

I don’t know how I’d be able to pay attention to any of them anyway, when Peeta’s staring me down with steel in his eyes. Funny, he’s all half-smiles and niceties around everyone else, but the second he sees me he flips the switch.

If she could ensure me a single day without Peeta’s existence rubbed in my face, I would sell my soul to Coin.

The hostility would hurt no matter what, but it would at least hurt less if he wasn’t so likeable otherwise. That supernatural charm of his is still just enough there to draw people in, or at least to make him tolerable despite how unstable we all know him to be. He has the capacity for kindness still, for gentleness — he demonstrated it with Annie the last time he sat here, even if he ruined it only moments later.

People still want to be around him, maybe to brag that they survived a dinner with Peeta Mellark, maybe to catch a glimpse of that covert niceness in action, or maybe just because of what they see when they look at him. Deep purple bruises under deeper blue eyes, fidgeting fingers smudged graphite-grey from art therapy. Sad, sweet Peeta. Beautiful, tragic, tortured, terrible, gorgeous Peeta. The kind of person you want equally to take care of and to covet.

And he is, and I see it just as much as anyone else can, and it makes my heart stick in my throat because I miss him, and then he opens his mouth and I forget any kind, wistful thought I’ve ever had for him.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” He says it like it doesn’t even matter, like he couldn’t care less, and in an instant I wish there was more hostility. The coolness is worse.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I say through clenched teeth, my voice coming out more like a growl than actual human speech. “I’m married, remember?”

Now I’m the one who’s put our table on edge. Even Johanna, who will smirk at the worst of jokes as long as they make someone else uncomfortable, has gone silent, her eyebrows raised so high they look like they’re trying to crawl off her face.

Peeta laughs, nonchalant, cool as ever, and I hate him for it. “My mistake.” His smirk is more like something Finnick would have worn onstage, and I don’t like the way it looks on his face, but the talking is worse. So much worse. “Does he get a dinner break too, your guard dog?”

“Peeta,” Delly says, her voice gentle but warning and her hand back on his arm. He ignores her, which makes it a little easier not to hate her.

“All the mutts get dinner here, don’t they?” I force my eyes to go as cold as his. At least, I try to. Maybe if I pretend hard enough that I don’t care about him he’ll stop this game between us. But then again, if I learned anything from Snow it’s that I’m a terrible actress.

He stares at me for a long time, searching my face like he’s trying to figure out where the facade starts and where it ends, and then he leans back in his chair, his chains clinking while he crosses his arms. I can’t tell if he’s found something that satisfies him or if he’s just given up.

All he says is, “Woof.”

Johanna laughs, at least. I guess she got her show.

All my strength is devoted to ignoring him through the rest of dinner, but when I dare a glance his way, he’s watching me so intently it makes the length of my spine tingle, and then I’m frozen in the chill of his stare, unable to look away.

It’s all in his eyes. That’s the issue, when it comes down to it.

When I was waiting for them to bring him back from the Capitol, I’d cradled his pearl in my hands and curled up in bed, where I could allow myself to think of nothing but his face. But when I thought of his face I only saw his hollowed cheeks, his bruised under-eyes. I zoomed in as close as I could, just like one of the fancy propo cameras, until the only thing I saw was the blue of his eyes.

Then it was a colour that reminded me of the lake beyond the fence of District 12. A place where there was food to be found, a place that kept me alive when there was no boy to toss me bread. 

Now, that blue is gone. The warmth, the brightness, taken over by cold, stormy blue. Not like the lake where I spent my happiest days with my father, but like the wedge in the arena where a monster wave destroyed everything in its path, ruthless.

_Tick tock,_ I think. It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?

As we stare openly, silently, none of the cafeteria noise able to reach me beneath the thunderous ocean in my ears, I wonder if he can hear it too. If he’s doing this on purpose. If he knows that even just this, the silence, the staring, could sink me, drown me, kill me.

I know if we were back in the arena right now, he’d be the one holding my head underwater. The thought should be terrifying, but the cold seeping into me isn’t from fear. All I can think of are his hands. A baker’s hands, an artist’s hands, shackled for who knows how long? I can’t help but wonder if that nightmare reunion will be the last time those hands ever touch me, and I don’t like the weight that settles in my stomach at the thought.

And then I’m stuck thinking about all the other things we’ll never do again, all the other last times, before the Capitol took him from me permanently. He drew portraits of me back then. He wanted to protect me back then. He shared a bed with me back then.

He loved me back then.

His brow furrows and his lips part, and I’m stuck somewhere between the breathless ache of realizing his love is something past tense now, and absolute terror of whatever might come out of his mouth next, and I shove off of the table as if he’s just lunged at me.

Everything in the cafeteria stops, every pair of eyes turned on me in an instant. I see them all in my peripheral. Delly’s shock, her mouth frozen in a perfect ‘o.’ The soldiers’ wide-eyed, ready-for-combat concern. Johanna’s bemused smile. But centre stage is Peeta, paused in a look of confusion, and I wonder if he’s slipping back into all the distorted memories of me and we really will need soldiers ready for action, but then something else flickers in his eyes.

Hurt.

And that’s it, there it is, my breaking point raising its feeble hands at last. I could throw up. I could collapse. I could bawl my eyes out. Instead I stalk out of there like the dining hall is the one who’s broken me.

It’s too much, too fast, and I can barely sift through my own thoughts, let alone think through the next step. My feet move without any intent or direction, and I don’t notice any of the stairwells or hallways or doors until I find myself at the threshold of the art closet and some of the weight slips from my shoulders. I duck inside, hiding behind bins of craft supplies, and wrap my arms around my knees, trying to think of anything else but him.

In the corner opposite me sits a tub of graphite pencils, the same as the ones that have left grey smudges all over Peeta’s hands, and in an instant they’re the ones staring at me so hard my stomach starts to swoop. I fly out of there before I lose my dinner.

My only option now is to head back to the compartment. Not the one I share with Johanna, but the one I used to share with my mother and Prim. Those were the beds that held me every time I wept over how much I missed him. And maybe Buttercup will let me pet him for a few minutes before we decide to hate each other again.

But then again, the odds haven’t been in my favour today. I’m only further reminded of this by the voices that trail down the hall towards me.

I flatten against the wall nearest the door, holding my breath. Men’s voices, a pair of soldiers based on the _thunk_ of their heavy-soled footsteps.

“She’s stubborn. You know that,” Gale says, his voice bouncing around the hall. I’d know his voice anywhere, for better or worse, just as I know who he’s talking about—me. I grit my teeth, waiting for the punchline. “There’s nothing she hates more than what she can’t have.”

It’s this part that gives me pause, this part that takes a second. I’m lost, so occupied trying to wade through the fog of what this could mean that I almost miss Finnick’s soft reply, delivered as gently as a lullaby. “Then it’s not really hate, is it?”

The footsteps stop while Gale and I both take a moment to process this from opposite sides of the wall. But I can’t even try to think of what Finnick means, of what he’s just said, can’t even hear my inner voice over my own heartbeat thumping in my head. My held breath is tight in my chest, begging to be let out, and my legs are trembling so hard I sink down to the floor before they can give out on me.

I’m not scared of being discovered, or of losing my secret safe place, or even of unstable, unpredictable, unloving Peeta. I’m only scared of Gale’s answer.

“No,” he finally says, and when I draw my shaking knees up to my chest the footsteps continue, loud enough that the men taking them don’t hear my shaking breath. “Not at all.”

I bite my arm to stifle the sob.


	9. Getaway Car

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I knew it from the first old fashioned, we were cursed,  
>  We never had a shotgun shot in the dark.  
> _

**Getaway Car**

It was a relief to be away from Peeta, but running from Thirteen felt like I was breaking some kind of code. Turning my back on him, on Haymitch, on anyone else holding out for his recovery. Peeta would have stayed for me, Haymitch persisted before we loaded onto the hovercraft for Two. But Peeta was always the nice one, and even he would need a leave of absence every now and then from a hijacked Katniss.

Wouldn’t he?

Even more than Two, Gale is my escape. My refuge. He always has been, hasn’t he? In the woods, when he was the only family I didn’t need to take care of. At home, when he was the only one I could trust to never have a Capitol camera in tow. And now in District 2, where he’s the only person who doesn’t bring Peeta up.

This, right here, away from everything and everyone else — this is where the two of us could have a shot.

They’re nothing like our woods, lush and green and damp, sheltering rabbits and squirrels and the rare deer. These are scraggly, sparse, with strawlike grass and birds that can only be shot because they haven’t yet learned that they’re prey. These are not our woods, but he makes them ours when he kisses me.

His mouth is hot and urgent on mine. The press of his lips feels like taking flight, like drifting up, up, up, far from the districts and the Capitol and the broken boy with the bread. The Mockingy is Panem’s, but right now I’m only his, sky-bound and singing.

He is in the air with me now, fingers tangled in my hair, his breath a summer breeze on my lips, my neck, the curve of my collarbone. I hold him close, as close as Peeta held me the night before the Quarter Quell. Too close. And it’s not Peeta’s careful hands on me now. Miner’s hands, broad and calloused and starved, but Gale and I have known hunger together. This is not completely foreign. 

And the next Games are just around the corner, the players and arena larger than ever, and Peeta’s not here to keep me alive anymore. I need something to remind me I’m still breathing.

This bothered him last time, my wandering thoughts. He said it was like I was drunk. But it turns out Gale would rather have drunk than nothing, and both of us will take what we can get.

And we get close to taking it all, hidden in the woods. Gale’s fingers trail fire up my ribs, and I press against the strain in his pants, and it seems we’ve both lost the ability to breathe, and then we disentangle from each other completely.

All I can think of is the night in the Training Center. Of Peeta, who I try so hard not to think of, not while I’m here. I have lost him, I know. I have let go of him too, or at least I’m trying to. As for whether I still want him, I don’t know. But I know this, right here, with Gale, in these woods that aren’t ours — this is not what I want.

He turns from both me and my apologies before they reach my lips, and stands with his hands on his hips and his breath rapid and heavy. I tug at my shirt, trying to make it look like it hadn’t been so nearly yanked off moments ago.

We don’t look at each other once on the way back to camp. There’s no point. I don’t need to look at his face to see how equally disappointed and unsurprised he is. It’s not such a mystery, why I can’t be with him in that way. Maybe not yet, or maybe not at all.

I think of the place he first kissed me, deep in the woods, hidden from everyone and everything. It was a show for no one, something pure and sincere because of that. But forced, too. It only happened because the Games happened, because he had to make it happen to get his hat in the ring. If I’d never kissed Peeta, would Gale have ever kissed me?

Would I have wanted him to?

Do I want him to now?

I’ve always been good at need, at survival, at staying alive. But want is alien to me, as unfamiliar as it is dangerous. I can tell what I wanted then no more than what I want now. Not when it comes to them anyway.

A getaway was what I wanted — what I _needed_. But it’s too late now, too late to run, and impossible to find a place far enough away. No one can outrun the Mockingjay. Not even me.


	10. King Of My Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The taste of your lips is my idea of luxury.  
> _

**King Of My Heart**

I am fine when I leave Johanna with my pine-bundle parting gift. I am fine when I hug my mother and Prim goodbye. I am fine when we suit up, when we board the hovercraft, when we shoot at abandoned Capitol streets, playing soldier while a real war rages on. I am fine when a hive of darts finds purchase in Leeg 2’s brain.

I am fine because if I am anything less, I will completely fall apart, and because all that’s left now is to kill Snow.

I am more alone than ever now, even surrounded by Squad 451. But this is the easiest way, I’ve decided. I’m better off removed from the rest of it, better off leaving Johanna and Prim and my mother on the best terms possible, better off pretending the uncomfortable tension between Gale and I doesn’t exist. Better off pretending Peeta doesn’t exist.

Yes, this is the easiest way. It helps that this is all temporary. I’m going to kill Snow, and then I will die for my trouble, but at least then it will be over. All of it.

And I’m fine with this, fine with the end of it all.

I am not fine with Peeta being part of the mission.

I am not fine when he’s airdropped like someone escaped from an institution, muttering to himself with wild, darting eyes. I am not fine when Boggs all but confirms his presence is a thinly-veiled assassination attempt courtesy of Coin. I am not fine when I’m suddenly the bad guy for not trusting him.

I am not fine when Boggs’ legs are blown off or when he transfers the holo to me. I am not fine when Peeta tackles me to the ground or when Mitchell wrenches him away so hard it might have broken his arm or when Peeta throws him into a Capitol trap. I am not fine when we leave Boggs to bleed out and Mitchell to be strangled by barbed wire, I am not fine when we zig-zag through the booby-trapped streets of the 76th annual Hunger Games, I am not fine when they get cuffs on Peeta or when they lock him in the closet or when Homes throws his corpse-like body over his shoulder to tote him alone like the prisoner he might as well be.

But when this tortured, weepy Peeta suggests the next move in our mission is to kill him, I am less fine than I ever have been. And this time, when everyone comes to his defence, I feel relief rather than shame. 

“You should get some sleep,” I tell him that night, firm, once I’ve attached his cuffs to the staircase railing as per his request. His hands are bound behind his back, forcing him into a stiff, upright sitting position. I can’t help but think how uncomfortable it must be to fall asleep with his arms twisted backwards like that, can’t help but notice how badly his wrists need some fresh air and ointment and bandages. But I’m not allowed to take care of him. Not anymore. So I bite my tongue and push the thought away, because I know what I’ll get in return if I offer it, and I’m too weary to shoulder this too.

“Yes, Commander Everdeen.” A week ago it would have come out bitter, hostile. I’m sure of it. But his voice is empty and weak and a little sad, with an attempt of a smile to match, and it clinches around my chest in a way I don’t like. It’s the voice of someone who’s just taken a life, and isn’t quite sure how much their own is worth now.

He blinks a few times, maybe realizing how obvious his suffering is, maybe thinking he doesn’t deserve to be upset when he’s the one who did the bad thing, or maybe just realizing I still don’t know how to talk to him anymore. “I mean, you’re running the show now, aren’t you? Queen of the Star Squad?”

I watch him carefully. “I guess so.” The vitriol is coming, I know it.

The not-quite-a-smile on his lips falters and all that’s left is numb fear, and in an instant he’s the boy whose hand I shook on Reaping Day. Not the Peeta hijacked from the Capitol, or the Peeta that Finnick has decided I love in one way or another, or the Peeta I grew to trust in the first Games. The Peeta from before all that, who at that point shared nothing with me but a rainy day and the searing heat of just-burnt bread.

He’s not just the boy with the bread, he’s the boy who made the Capitol fall in love with me, the boy who didn’t want to be a piece in everyone’s games. But the Mellark bakery was razed to the ground, and I’m the Capitol’s biggest threat, and the pair of us have been pieces in too many games to count now.

“Should I be saluting to you now, then?” he asks, but I can’t meet his eyes. I can’t be fine when I’m looking at him.

“Not trying to kill me would be adequate.” It’s maybe a little too harsh considering the day’s events, but it doesn’t provoke anything caustic in him. He only stares at me, scrutinizing, like he’s trying to determine if the point is to hurt him more.

“Fair enough,” he finally says, and then gives one of his cuffed hands a little wave. “Though I don’t think these can do much damage like this.”

He sounds so sad, so fully aware now of the kind of damage those hands are capable of, and I want to reach out and hold them, but I can’t bear to be pushed away by him.

“You used to paint with those hands,” I say after a few long moments.

His head tilts the slightest bit and his eyes lock on mine, searching and searching. But whatever he’s looking for, he apparently can’t find it in me, because he leans his head back against the staircase railing, and mumbles only, “Real.”

He doesn’t say anything else, but when his eyes drift shut his lips start moving. Maybe he’s renewing his vows to throttle me, or maybe he’s just praying for a dreamless sleep. I gave up on prayers a long time ago, and the only way I’ve found to keep the nightmares at bay is no longer an option. Unless I’d like to be strangled in my sleep.

When the rest of the room falls asleep, I am finally able to breathe.

It was never supposed to be like this. I was never supposed to be part of a squad. I was never supposed to be in charge of anything. I was never supposed to be anyone’s Mockingjay. I was never supposed to be in the Games. Never supposed to lose my father. Never supposed to survive childhood, probably.

I swallow hard and dare a glance Peeta’s way. He’s so much easier to look at when asleep, his ever-furrowed features smoothed and peaceful. The closest I will ever get to the Peeta he was before.

But he’s not asleep. His eyes are open, shining softly in the starlight that leaks through the window, and completely focused on me.

I run through the facts in my head. He’s cuffed to a metal railing. No one else is awake but the two of us. If he breaks free he’ll wake everyone up. He’s only a few feet away, but not enough to land a kick if he tried it. My gun is much closer than he is.

I don’t even get a moment to feel reassured, because the guilt crashes down on me instantly.

_You and me, we made a deal to try to save him_ , Haymitch had told me that morning, the crackle of the radio not loud enough to hide how furious he was with me. _Try to remember,_ he said, as if it was ever possible to forget. It’s the only thing I can think about these days.

“Can’t sleep?” I ask slowly, softly, gently. Like I’m trying to coax a frightened animal out of its hiding place.

“Nightmares,” he says, and his voice sounds as hollow as my insides feel. “You know, I used to think the nightmares from the Games were bad.” He stares at the floor, and the muscle in his jaw twitches as he clenches and unclenches his teeth. “The ones from the Capitol are worse.”

“Are the nightmares shiny too?” I ask, tucking my knees up to my chest and wrapping my arms around them. “Or is it just memories?”

“Shiny. Yeah,” he echoes, and he’s staring right through me now, lost in a place where I can’t quite get to him. A place I’ll never get him back from. He blinks hard a few times, forcing himself back into the present. “The nightmares aren’t. Just the memories they altered.”

Memories of me. Memories he can sift through, sometimes. But not enough to make him the way he was before. Once they’ve been broken enough, some things can never been fixed. The same goes for people.

“You should get some sleep,” I tell him again, because I don’t know what else to say to him and it’s so much easier to cope with his closeness when he’s asleep. To have him stop staring at me would be enough.

He moves his shoulders a little bit, trying to find a more comfortable position but realizing the handcuffs prevent prevent that entirely. Then he lets out a weary sigh, his chest deflating with the exhale, and he hangs his head.

It’s a disturbing image, his hands chained to the wall and his head hanging limp and all the life knocked out of him. My father’s old song drifts tunelessly into my head — _They strung up a man they say who murdered three_ — and the words and the sight of him and the knowledge of his pain are all too much, all at once, and without a moment wasted to weigh the dangers I stretch out my hand to brush a wave of hair from his forehead.

He freezes, and I realize that this was a horrible and foolish move on my part, but also that he hasn’t yet recoiled. So I continue to smooth back his hair, and it hits me then how exhausted he must be because his head droops the slightest bit more, almost like he’s leaning into my touch.

I swallow hard, fight the ache in my chest. Some broken things can’t be fixed, I remind myself.

“You’re still trying to protect me. Real or not real,” he whispers.

“Real,” I whisper back, and I think of everything he’s done for me, everything he’s given up. The bread, his leg, his heart when he gave me that locket on the beach. Mine is a debt that will never be fully repaid, but I decide to honour it for as long as I’m alive. So I tell him, “Because that’s what you and I do. Protect each other.”

He’s already done his part. More than. He deserves to know that I intend to do mine.

His forehead creases again, and I brush his temple with my thumb before letting my hand slip away. What new torment have I brought to his mind? What distorted, shiny memory will keep him from sleep now?

“Before the Quarter Quell…,” he begins, his brow so deeply furrowed that his entire face starts to tremble, and I fight to control my breathing. It’s selfish of me, but I don’t want to share his horrors. I have enough of my own. “…You had me in your bed.”

I blink a few times, and I wonder if this is how Peeta feels all the time now. This is an accusation that I wasn’t ready for, that I don’t quite understand, and I’m sifting through all the nights I fell asleep next to him before the Quell, trying to determine which one is not like the others.

I open my mouth to ask him a clarifying question, but when our eyes lock it clicks.

_Oh._

My breath catches in my throat and my eyes dart around the darkened space to figure out who else heard the implication in his voice, but there’s no one else awake but him and I. Even Gale is snoring off to the side, and it occurs to me how strange his presence here is now. On that night in the Training Center, it was like he didn’t even exist.

“Real,” I finally say, fighting the tremble in my voice.

“But I wouldn’t let you do anything,” he continues, more decisive now. “Real or not real?”

It’s my turn to go searching, my turn to examine every grain of colour in his eyes for whatever this is supposed to be. What does he remember about things he wouldn’t let me do? I remember being so sure until he stopped me, knowing he was protecting us both in that moment, knowing that if he hadn’t I would have gone further with him than I’d ever gotten in the woods with Gale.

I’m grateful for the cover of night to hide my burning cheeks. “Real.”

“Why not?” he asks, and I nearly choke on my own breath. “I’m sure I wanted to?”

Nothing so brazen has ever come out of his mouth — at least not in my presence. The Peeta that was with me that night would never have asked anything so forthright, and definitely not while there were other people around to overhear. Even if they _are_ all asleep.

“You said you didn’t want it like that,” I say, trying to find anything else to focus my attention on so I don’t look like such a coward for not meeting his gaze. I’m unsuccessful. So I draw in a steeling breath and raise my eyes to meet his. “And neither did I. And you were right.”

It’s not quite warm, the look on his face. But there’s no hostility either. Just a kind of quiet intrigue — a small frown, a slight tilt of his head. “How did I know that?”

My voice is nearly gone, my throat tight out of nowhere. I’ve watched a woman forced to abandon her sister’s body. I’ve watched someone’s father have his legs blown off. I’ve watched a man thrown to his death by someone who was supposed to be his ally. Somehow none of it has shaken me more than this conversation, more than Peeta asking me questions so intimate when he’s never been further away.

“Because you loved me,” I finally whisper.

He pauses for a long time, watching me, and I stare back. “Loved,” he echoes, the last word that comes from his lips that night.

I expect it to slice right through me, this harsh reminder of what once was and never again will be. But it’s not that. It’s quiet, weary, thoughtful. Like it’s something worth considering.

Whatever the bright, fluttering feeling is that wells up in my chest, I fight it. I crush it down, stomp it in until it’s as dead and gone as the Peeta who loved me.

Some broken things can’t be fixed. And if I lose him twice I know I won’t recover.

“You should get some sleep,” I tell him for the third and final time that night, and then I turn away, less so to watch the windows and more to avoid whatever painful thing I might see in his eyes next.

I am not fine.

Boggs is dead. Mitchell is dead. Jackson is dead. Homes is dead. Castor is dead. Messalla is dead. Leegs 1 and 2 are dead. Finnick is dead.

_Finnick is dead. I should be dead._

All gone, all dead, all my fault.

I am not fine. And I am not the only one.

Blood gushes from Gale’s wound. Tears flow freely from Pollux’s eyes. Bits of mutt flesh cling to Cressida’s jacket. But Gale uses the metallic wall to bandage his neck, and Pollux wipes his eyes and stands tall with his chin still trembling, and Cressida wipes her face and hands on the inside of her jacket before dumping it next to the metal grate that divides us from the corpses of our friends and the Capitol creatures that killed them.

We are all that’s left. Us four and Peeta, cowering against the wall with something manic in his eyes.

“Peeta?”

“Leave me,” he says when I reach him, his voice strangled. “I can’t hang on.”

“Yes, you can.” I clutch him by the arm, and I wonder how I managed to pretend only days ago that I would let him die if I had to.

“I’m losing it. I’ll go mad. Like them.”

Like a Capitol mutt, because he might as well be. There’s so much suffering in his eyes, and it’s because he knows it’s true. It must be true. Haven’t I said as much to him before?

But he’s not a mutt, he’s Peeta, and even if he’s not the same Peeta he was before, I can’t let him go. I’ve been hoping, dreaming, dying to keep him since the Gamemakers told us we could leave the arena together. Since we stopped speaking in 12, since our sham of an engagement, since the first time I had to defend him from Gale, since the night I had him in my bed, since I destroyed the arena to bring him home, since Snow ruined any chance of Peeta ever coming home.

Since he ran from the bakery with two burnt loaves, rain-matted hair and a red-marked, fast-swelling cheek.

I can’t lose the boy with the bread. I won’t.

So I cup his jaw in my hands and press my lips against his, clinging to him even as he convulses head-to-toe, even as his chest heaves and his fingers contort at his sides, only pulling away when my lungs empty of air. And even then, breathless, I clutch his jittery hands and whisper, “Don’t let him take you from me.”

“No. I don’t want to…” There’s a storm in his eyes, an awful wavering, bright lines of red from the overtaxed blood vessels behind his pupils. I can see in them the dogs from the first Games, the razor-toothed monkeys from the Quell, a million horrors from the depths of the Capitol’s dungeons that I can’t name.

“Stay with me,” I tell him, and in this moment I’m not a Mockingjay or a Commander or even a Victor, I’m a seventeen year-old girl who can’t bear to lose him too.

He blinks, and somehow it’s dissipated in an instant, troubled waters calmed, nothing left but bright, steady blue. “Always.”

All I want in this moment is to kiss him again, but my head is too fuzzy to think of what this means and the taste of his lips is a luxury I can’t afford right now and I don’t want to indulge anyway with Gale watching. So I help him to his feet, and the remnants of Squad 451 flee the Capitol’s underground as if nothing ever happened.

But before he slips his hand from mine, he gives it a squeeze, so light I might have imagined it.

Real or not real, all at once, it’s enough.


	11. Dancing With Our Hands Tied

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I knew there was no one in the world who could take it.  
>  I had a bad feeling,  
> but we were dancing, dancing with our hands tied.  
> _

**Dancing With Our Hands Tied**

My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. I am the Mockingjay. I survived the Hunger Games twice. I have lost my father, my sister, my home, and now my mind.

I should be dead.

“You’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay,” they tell me when I wake up. A chorus of voices — anonymous medics, my mother, Haymitch — a chorus of liars. Nothing is okay. Nothing will ever be okay.

It feels so long ago, when I volunteered for Prim, when I offered my life so hers would still have a chance. When I held her that morning until the nightmare subsided, when I stayed by her side after every nightmare prior, when I told her that everything was going to be okay. It was true then, because I made it true. I did everything I could, everything I had to to keep her alive.

What I would give to hear her voice one more time, have her wake me from my own nightmares, wrap her arms around me and tell me herself that everything is going to be okay. But when I think of her, think of her voice, all I hear is my name. Her final word. _Katniss_. The girl on fire, the girl who burned and let everyone else burn with her. The girl who, at the end of it all, didn’t protect her sister.

I hate every inch of myself, and the feeling is mutual. Angry, baby-pink, melted flesh. Parts that have been rebuilt and rerranged, that must be persuaded to associate with me. Half-singed hair, choppy and wild, strands fleeing from my scalp daily. Nothing wants to be close to me anymore.

I should be dead. But they refuse to let me die.  


They deliver me information I never ask for, just like Haymitch did in 13, hounding me with updates about hijacked Peeta. But I’m in Peeta’s shoes this time, ruined by the Capitol. The only thing that still keeps me going is the thought of destroying the mutt who demolished everything I ever held dear.

Maybe they should have let him kill me in 13.

There is food in the hospital, and voices, and morphling. Food I don’t remember eating but taste on my tongue. Voices telling me everything that Panem has become, everyone who is no longer alive to partake in it. Morphling that takes it all away until I awake once more, suddenly, like bursting out from underwater to catch your breath and finding that the world around you has gone up in flames.

I find the rose garden without looking for it, and with Paylor’s permission. The guards should have given him away. If not that, the thick, cloying smell of roses should have. But somehow I am shocked to see Snow there, trimming the bushes, offering a perfect ivory rosebud to me.

I am even more shocked to find only weariness where I anticipated rage, emptiness where I anticipated the need to _kill_.

He pretends to grieve my sister. He pretends he wasn’t the one to drop the bombs that killed her. I pretend that I don’t hear him, that I don’t believe him. That he’s just another liar joining the chorus. But I’ve never been a good enough actress to fool either of us. And we did agree never to lie to each other, after all.

I don’t want to think about Prim becoming a human torch, or the bombs that transformed her, or the person who gave the order to drop them, or the person who developed the weapon and its strategy. So I think of Coin instead, and how none of us have been watching her closely enough, and how it all connects back to her one way or another.

Each of us has been a piece in these games the entire time. This foolish, bloody, horrible song and dance, swaying and twirling and two-stepping around each other, each of us with our hands tied. Who is running the show? I know. Snow does too.

We didn’t see her. Neither of us. We didn’t trust her, but we also didn’t see her, and now it’s too late. No one wins in war. Peeta warned me from the Capitol, in each of his broadcasts, but I didn’t see him either.

I don’t know if I made it back to bed myself or if I was delivered here after another fainting spell, but I wake with no recollection of falling asleep in the first place. The fire in my gut is embers now, still burning but diminished, a glow the same gold as the locket on my dresser.

Locket, spile, pearl.

Black dots crawl across my eyes when I stand but I push through, leaning against the wall to stay upright. I sweep these forgotten treasures up in my arms a moment before my legs give out, and I cradle them from the floor.

The pearl, the thing that kept me tethered to Peeta even when he was locked up in the Capitol, something with far more longevity than a loaf of bread. The spile, the thing that kept us alive long enough that I thought I might get him out of that arena safely. The locket, the thing he used to try to convince me I could ever have a life outside the arena.

I slide the catch, let the tiny gold door swing open, and in an instant I shut it again. Gale, Mother, Prim. These are not faces I want to see right now.

I set the locket down like it’s about to combust, take the pearl instead, and roll it between my fingers.

Why didn’t Peeta put his own picture in the locket, I wonder? It would have gone against his argument about how a life without him could still be possible for me, sure, but it was a stupid argument anyway. _I need you_ , I told him on the beach after he gave me the locket and the speech, before I kissed him like we weren’t in the arena but in a Training Centre bedroom. Did he not know before then?

He’s in the burn ward too, or was. They told me so weeks ago, when I first woke up, but I never asked if I could see him. I never said a word to any of them.

I’ve since tried to figure out why I haven’t tried to see him. It’s easy to meditate on this, on all the complicated, messy feelings I’ve grown so used to wrestling with. Far easier than meditating on the fact that he’s so near and yet I know nothing about his condition, anyway. The closest I’ve come to a concrete answer, however, is only the cold that settles inside me.

I’m afraid.

Of him? I can’t tell. Surely he’s not still so hijacked, I think, but that only makes me think of the moment that convinced me he was going to be okay again, and that makes me think of everyone who had to die along the way, and then my lungs have my thrashing heart in a chokehold and I’ve already decided Snow will be the first of us to die.

I tuck my chin and pull up my knees and wrap my arms so hard around myself that it might be the only thing left keeping me together. This is better. Compact, quiet, eyes shut so tight that my head pounds and mystery patterns dance behind my eyelids. By the time the ache is so unbearable I’m forced to open my eyes, the sun has sunk beyond the horizon and my room is completely dark.

I roll Peeta’s pearl between my thumb and forefinger, and I wonder if he’s barricaded himself in his own mansion room, not so far away from mine. I wonder if he sits on his floor in the dark, curls up in the fetal position, shuts himself off from everything around him because any of it is too much at once to bear.

What if we’d had our own safe place, alone and together, away from all the things burning down around us? Away from the Capitol’s spotlights, without anyone prying into whatever might have been between us, in the dark with all the lights out — would I have loved him then like everyone said I did?

I would have kissed him again, I know that. I’d have held him, shared one more horrorless sleep with him, had him squeeze my hand one more time to remind me it would all be okay.

But nothing is okay. Nothing will ever be okay.


	12. Dress

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Inescapable, I’m not even going to try  
>  And if I get burned, at least we were electrified.  
> _

**Dress**

The last time I had a prep team that didn’t seem irreparably damaged was after the Victory Tour, back when I still had a home and a family and even a fiance.

What a lucky girl I was.

We’d just finished a day-long photoshoot of wedding looks for the Capitol. Sixteen hours of hair-pulling and face-scrubbing and shoes that pinched my toes, and a good five minutes spent trying to catch my breath after a malfunction with a particularly fussy corset.

Flavius wiped the last of the makeup off my face, leaving my skin pink and raw even after he slathered on a greenish, sweet-smelling cream. “It has soothing properties,” he insisted, and before I got a chance to formally disagree, Cinna swept into the room with another armful of garment bags.

Flavius disappeared without a word, likely hoping to avoid my meltdown at this fresh batch of costumes no one had warned me about, so there was only Cinna to hear me whine. “Tell me you didn’t bring more dresses,” I pleaded, though I already had an answer based on the length of some of the bags.

“See for yourself,” he said, wheeling a rack over and arranging the hangers on it neatly. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, but his voice betrayed nothing either, so I had no choice but to peruse this new collection of his.

I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d been anticipating, but it wasn’t crimson silk or intricate lace trim or criss-crossing straps or thigh-high slits in the skirt. The next garment was just as confounding, a slip with a plunging neckline and a layer of black jewels sewed in so carefully that the orange underlay mimicked the dark glow of a coal fire. Another bag revealed something with billowy charcoal sleeves and a gauzy skirt that would barely drop past my thighs, and I was beginning to see the trend by then even if it was unnerving me.

“These aren’t real dresses, Cinna,” I said slowly, holding out the skirt so the light caught the tiny needle-prick sequins, orange like floating embers.

“No, they’re not,” he agreed, smoothing the charcoal fabric as I started on the next bag’s zipper. “They’re the kind you wear for someone else to take off.”

A soft orange bodice with a lace trim, scalloped in a way that reminded me more of clouds than the rest of the fire Cinna had brought with him. Just below the ribcage the bodice cut off with another band of lace, and then a dual-layered chiffon—the top skirt the same soft orange as the rest of it and the underlay peachy pink, giving the whole piece a warm, glowing hue just like a sunset.

This was not the girlish dress for the Victor of the 74th Hunger Games. This was something else entirely.

It hit me all at once then: Cinna’s words, his hand on my shoulder, how stunning the gauzy thing before me was, the fact that this was meant to be the grand wedding’s aftershow. The part where there was no audience but Peeta.

A shiver ran through my entire body, and as mortified as I was that there was anyone there to see it at all, I was relieved Cinna was the only one, relieved that my prep team had abandoned me to gush over Prim’s beautiful flaxen braids in the other room.

“Portia and I were each commissioned to design a line to celebrate the wedding,” Cinna finally said, shifting his hand to rub my back in small, soothing circles. “Sponsored by the happy couple, of course.”

“They’re beautiful,” I managed in a voice so distant it didn’t even sound like my own.

“You get to choose which ones go to the runway, and then to sale, of course.” His hand stopped, and I felt him peering at me, but still I couldn’t look his way, too occupied by the gauzy fabric between my fingers. “So, say you find any that don’t seem cut out for the Capitol runway…” He paused then, reached out a hand to smooth out the same skirt I couldn’t stop touching. “Well, they’re yours to do with as you please.”

Mine to toss, burn, tear to shreds. Mine to keep.

Mine to share with Peeta.

And then came the final blow, the full realization, the understanding of all the implications there were when Haymitch told us we would never get off our train. I would love Peeta as long as there are cameras to soak it up, I would marry Peeta for our doting audience, I would bear his children, and I would do everything that comes in between.

I kept a few of the ankle-length slips that could pass for summer sleepwear, and the orange one as well. If Peeta was going to see any of them, that was the clear choice. Cinna rounded up the prep team, I got a kiss on my cheek from all three of them on their way out the door, and then one last hug from Cinna before he followed, all his other designs in tow.

I tucked my newest wedding gifts into my closet after he left and tried my best not to think of their intended use.

And then the Quarter Quell was announced and everything fell apart, and I forgot completely about anything fickle or pretty I owned because I had no use for any of it anymore, and I continued not to remember until I brought Annie to District 12 to borrow one of Cinna’s masterpieces for her wedding.

I found them stashed in the back of my closet while my prep team helped Annie into one of many dresses in the other room. Untouched, exactly where I left them. The longer ones blurred into the rest of my neglected wardrobe, blending in with all the other ankle-length silk, but the soft orange stood out as I knew it always would.

It brought on such peculiar feelings when I first saw it, fear and longing and thoughts of Peeta that turned my cheeks red, but the strangeness of the feelings then were even worse. Knowing that this was supposed to be his gift as much as mine, and knowing that neither of us would ever have use for it. Knowing I would never put it on and he would never see it, and the strange melancholy that followed those realizations.

“Get ready, Katniss!” Octavia trilled, poking her head in the closet door, and my head jerked up, my breathing unsteady and my cheeks warm. “Oh! Are you alright, dear?”

I let out a breathy little laugh and fanned a hand over my face. “Oh, just a bit stuffy in here.”

A sigh slipped from her lips, bright and relieved. “Well, come on then! Let’s get you out of there.”

Whatever I was thinking or feeling about Peeta vanished when I saw the dress on her. “Oh, Annie,” I breathed, and when she turned to look at me I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen eyes so bright.

She wore floor-length silk, a soft bluish green that reminded me of Finnick’s eyes, her hair fell in gentle waves, and there was nothing my closet held that could be as radiant as her in that moment.

It was amazing, Cinna’s touch for beautiful clothes that only made the wearer even more beautiful. I was convinced he only made masterpieces.

I still am convinced he only makes masterpieces. He’s just not around to make them anymore.

My Mockingjay suit dangles limp from its hanger, as dark as a funeral shroud, and somehow still the brightest thing in the room. Everything is gloomy here. The ultra-quiet mansion, my weary prep team, the dull look in Effie’s eyes.

I dress silent and alone in a bedroom that, albeit temporary, is supposed to be mine but doesn’t at all feel like it. The only things that are mine here are my gifts. The spile, the pearl, the locket, the suit. The most precious of all the gifts, hidden in the little pocket that sits by my collarbone.

The girl in the mirror is someone foreign and familiar, both the girl on fire that burnt Panem to the ground and the Capitol mutt Panem created. But she is dressed like something indestructible, suited black head-to-toe, a sheath of arrows strapped to her back and something cold and dead and determined in her eyes.

The Mockingjay, suited up for her final mission.

I run a hand down the upper half of my suit, tracing the resilient stitches, the fortified armour, the hiding places for knives that start at my underarms and end at my calves.

I never did try on any of those wedding gifts. I never really got a chance to, but they were impractical anyway. I’d have no real use for them even as summer sleepwear. I’d have been mortified if I ever got caught in them. But I’m so aware of the fact that this here is the last costume I will ever wear, and maybe somewhere in the middle of all this I deserved something lush and impractical just once, and that they were gifts for Peeta too and maybe he should have gotten to see them himself.

Effie taps softly on the door, and I have no more time for wistful musing, and as I step out of my chambers for the last time with all my dearest treasures loaded in my pockets, I hope the things I leave behind will end up with him. My locket and spile and pearl to remind him of a time when all we wanted to do was protect each other, and even that silly orange slip.

I won’t be around to tell him all the things that were real or not real, and maybe he’ll fall back into the trace of Capitol poison that likely still sits in his mind, but if he can’t remember anything of me that is good or sweet, I hope he can at least remember his favourite colour.

Soft, like the sunset. Gentle, like him. As beautiful and reliable and perfect as the way he loved me.


	13. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You stabbed me in the back while shaking my hand  
>  And therein lies the issue, friends don't try to trick you,  
> Get you on the phone and mind-twist you,  
> And so I took an axe to a mended fence.  
> _

** This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things **

President Snow’s reign is over. The rebellion is over.The war is over.

All the fun we’ve had in this half-year of war crimes is over, our big vacation party in the presidential estate is over, and no one is left to celebrate with me. Prim is dead. My mother has left to salvage the people still salvageable. Gale has taken his bombs with him to somewhere far enough away that I don’t have to spend a moment this last day thinking about him.

There is nothing left that is nice or good or kind or unbroken. There is no one left to hold on to me now, to hold me close, to hold me down, to hold me back. All that’s left is the president’s board room, its circle of victors, and the greatest victor of all at the head of the table, her chin held high.

I stare at her like my life depends on it, and in a way I think it might. I barely have the backbone to do what I’m scheduled to in a few minutes, and if for a moment I let the blonde boy’s searching blue eyes penetrate mine, I’m sure my spine will dissolve completely.

Another Hunger Games. That’s what she proposes. I am horrified, but I am not surprised. Perhaps that is why I am able to maintain my composure, even when Annie’s hands start to tremble and Johanna bursts into raucous, manic laughter and Peeta’s eyes flicker like he might descend back into that place where I’m the most horrific thing he can imagine. Perhaps that is why I am able to vote in favour of another round of nightmares for everyone. And perhaps that is why Haymitch trusts me, because though I may be violent and mistrustful and manipulate and deadly, I am also clever, and we are far too similar for our own good. We have lived through too many of these games now, Haymitch and I.

Coin is taken aback by our vote, and mostly manages to conceal her pleasure when she announces the outcome. The Mockingjay is not as rogue as she’s anticipated. The Mockingjay is singing a tune she’s familiar with. The Mockingjay is not standing for forgiveness, but penance.

These are things Coin can get behind, as long as the Mockingjay stays behind her.

I refuse to meet Peeta’s gaze. I can’t. But I can feel his eyes burning into me, the horror, the fury, the confusion, the hurt. But this is good, I tell myself. It’s easier for us both if he hates me again.

I leave as soon as the vote is over. The executioner can’t be late for the President’s final ceremony, after all. This is the excuse I’m prepared to use when Peeta chases me down. But I feel only the presence of my escorts behind me. There’s no hand on my shoulder, no voice calling my name down the corridor. It seems I have lost the boy with the bread at last.

The sun is blinding, bouncing off the smooth, silvery marble in the courtyard, hiding the packed stands from me for a few moments. I was terrified the first time I saw this place, Peeta clutching my hand in our chariot. But I am not on fire this time, and I understand the way these games are played now, and I am no longer trying to convince anyone to keep me alive.

Snow is bound to a post, looking regal as ever in a tailored suit, though his cheeks are a little sunken, his mouth tinged with red. He doesn’t need an arrow. Death is coming for him. Even if it wasn’t, there will only be suffering for the rest of his brief life.

Coin, however, is still young. Resilient. Proud. Someone who still needs to be dealt with.

But these are things I already know, things I have known for longer than I might be able to admit.

I notch my arrow and draw the string, and all I can see is the identical smile the presidents of Panem share. It’s a regal smile, a knowing smile, a victor’s smile.

But nobody wins in these games.

Coin falls from the balcony and the presidents are spewing blood, her from the arrow in her chest and him from his coughing mouth, and everyone is swarming, swarming, swarming. Rushing to Coin to see if she is salvageable, rushing to Snow to see how many feet it takes to stomp him dead, rushing to me for an end equally cruel and deserving.

I lunge for my nightlock pill at the same moment the first hand descends upon me, and my teeth sink into flesh rather than fabric, but I don’t need arrows to kill.

I turn on my assailant at the same moment my arms are ripped backwards and cuffs bite my wrist, but there’s no grieving, vengeful rebel before me with a bloodied hand, only Peeta, interfering in my plans one last time.

And I hate him in this moment, despise him. There is nothing he could have said or done while sunken in his hijacked brain that could have been crueler, and I’m sure the hijacked him is back, that this is his final punishment. But there is nothing hateful in his eyes.

But before I get to figure out what exactly lingers in its place, I am yanked away by a squad of guards to somewhere I will never see Peeta again.


	14. Call It What You Want

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _All my flowers grew back as thorns,  
>  Windows boarded up after the storm.  
> He built a fire just to keep me warm._
> 
> __

**Call It What You Want**

Everything crumbles after I kill Coin. Panem’s plans, her plans, my plans. Panem gets no leader, Coin gets no throne, I get no peace. Not the kind I want, anyway.

The girl on fire is now the girl they want tied to the burning stake. I am no longer the Capitol’s darling, nor the rebels’ Mockingjay. All my loving titles have been snatched away, my crown taken at last. Now I am only Katniss Everdeen, the crazy girl who murdered the President, who speaks to no one, who fills her luxury prison with song.

Nobody hears from me for months, and I don’t hear from them. Not until Haymitch visits me—my first visitor since they carried me away from the bloodstained courtyard—and tells me my trial is over and I have been pardoned.

I am fed, washed, clothed, strapped into a hovercraft due east to District 12, and when we take off I hear about the world beyond my prisoner’s mansion. Paylor’s election, Gale’s fancy new District 2 job, Annie’s pregnancy.

Plutarch leaves me at the hovercraft door, and Haymitch leaves me at the threshold of my victor’s home—no, house. It was never really a home, and it never will be. Not for me.

Relief trickles through me once I’m finally alone. It’s the first cognitive emotion I’ve had in months. I will do much better here, as isolated as ever, finally free from my guards and locked doors and twenty-four hour surveillance. Free from anyone left who might interfere.

I allow myself one final night in the Victors’ Village. I unpack my father’s photo from a box of treasures forgotten in 13 and the Capitol. I burn Snow’s rose in the fireplace. I scour the house in search of anything that might still smell like Prim. I’m about to crawl into her bed for this last sleep, nose pressed deep into her favourite sweater, when I hear a tiny, pitiful mewl.

It must be my imagination. My mind has been unreliable for a while now. But the mews keep echoing from the foyer, and I know I won’t fall asleep if I think I’m playing tricks on myself, so I leave my sweet-smelling treasures on the bed and venture out to ease my mind.

Buttercup has been through hell on his journey from District 13. But he is as real and lost as I am and I have never hated the stupid cat more.

“She’s not here,” I tell him, quiet and bitter. My throat aches from these, the first words I’ve spoken in months. “She’s gone.” My voice is hoarse and croaky but louder now, fiercer. “She’s not here! She’s not coming back!” Louder still and cracking at the end, but this time it’s grief breaking me. And with one more part of me broken, unusable, I break entirely.

My knees hit the floor and my tears follow swiftly, dotting the hardwood, and there’s a new mantra between my sobs now. “She’s dead,” I tell the cat, I tell myself, I tell the old, creaking bones of the house that will never hold her again. I will never hold her again. “She’s dead.” And Buttercup begins to wail with me, and we sing our grief together in awful chorus, and when I crawl back to Prim’s room to sleep through my suffering, he follows.

When I wake with a scratchy throat and aching eyes, he is crouched beside me, alert, guarding me from whatever next harm might send me howling.

“One more night. That’s it,” I tell him, cleaning his cuts and digging out the thorn burrowed deep into his paw. We both cry from the pain of it all, and when I set my first aid supplies to the ground, he rubs his head against my knees, still mewling heartache.

One more night to babysit him while he figures out how to live with it all—a broken foot, a broken heart, a broken world—and then I’m done. But then my babysitter arrives, and there is a new wrinkle in my plans.

Greasy Sae cooks and cleans for me, makes sure I eat and bathe and change shirts every day. Her granddaughter is indifferent towards me at first, in the way children won’t acknowledge any adult that doesn’t automatically fit into their tiny world, but I let her play with the yarn left behind by the rest of my family and she begins to warm to me. When I find her a skein the colour of a lake in summer, I have put all the light in her eyes.

One more week, I decide. That is enough time to thank Sae for everything she’s done for me over these long, horrible years. That is enough time to leave her granddaughter with pleasant memories of this house and the girl who once lived here. It will be nice to have person remember me fondly, I think.

“Spring’s in the air today,” Sae tells me on the seventh day. “You ought to get out. Go hunting.”

Get out. Get lost in the woods. Get peace. I am trusted to be unsupervised now, trusted to make my own choices. It's time.

I won’t be using them, but I bring my bow and arrows with me anyway. I’ll stash them in the same hollowed log, and someday someone braver and stronger than me will find it and make it theirs. But for now they bolster me on my trek, keep my spine a little straighter for this final stroll through town. I could use some courage. 

I pass the mayor’s house and the cart in front of it and weary, coal-dusted Thom who confirms there were no survivors. I pass what used to be the Hob, now once-bombed and twice-burned. I pass under the fence as uncharged and lifeless as the rest of 12.

They will rebuild, I remind myself. They have always been a resilient people, and they will continue to be. And for those who aren’t so resilient, there are other things. Meadows and unbarred woods and balls of brightly-coloured yarn.

I stop at the foot of a wide tree, its branches thick and gnarled, twisting high above my head. The leaves are just starting to come in, tiny dots of green to break up the spidery limbs and the patches of grey-blue sky between them. Greasy Sae was right. Spring is in the air.

Save for my father’s picture, I left my box of abandoned treasures untouched. I knew exactly what it would contain; a parachute, a spile, a locket, a pearl. A bird on a gold pin. More importantly, I knew what it wouldn’t contain: Cinna’s final gift, that perfect little pill crushed under some rebel’s boot in a Capitol courtyard.

His gifts have gotten me so far for so long, but I’m resourceful, clever. Someone worth betting on. This, I can do on my own.

There’s a fluttering in the trees above me and despite how little I care for my own survival, my guard is up in an instant. Once more, I am hunted. It’s familiar and terrible, and I’m about to unleash a scream so wounded and awful that it will either dispel my assailant or provoke its killing blow, and I would be fine with either.

But I see the twitch of feathered limbs then, the rapid-blinking eyes, the sharp tilt of the head. A mockingjay.

My knees give out, my palms burn when they catch the gritty earth, and everything inside me is cold. I am empty. There is nothing left in me. And when there is nothing I sing, but I don’t even have that in me. I muster what is left for one last parting gift, one last song for the birds to duet with an Everdeen, but it’s Rue’s four-note tune that escapes my lips.

There is a flock in the trees, a whole choir of them, and they carry her little song far and high and I weep into the dirt, because that’s what I do now. That’s all I ever do. I weep and I remember.

And this is the crux of it, the remembering. The list grows and grows and grows, the hands that take turns at the shovel to dumb the ashes into my lungs, and it’s already such a burden and I know there will only be more names to add as the years go by. Sae and Haymitch and Johanna and Annie and the child she carries, and one day even Peeta and Gale.

I can’t bear it, not anymore, not alone. But the birds have already dropped Rue’s song, waiting for a new tune worth their time, and if I don’t remember, who will?

They must be remembered. They need to be. They deserve to be. And no one but me knows just how Prim wept when she wrapped her arms around her goat for the first time. No one but me knows the light in Rue’s eyes after the first filling meal she’d ever had, after knowing we’d made sure the Careers would never have another. No one else knows Darius’s crooked grin whenever he’d tug on my braid, or the graceful dance of Madge’s fingers across her piano keys, or the particular shade of blue that lights Greasy Sae’s granddaughter with wonder. No one knows Wiress’ smile when she had someone to share her genius with, or the pine bundle Johanna still has with her in 7, or the ferocious love Mags and Finnick shared for Annie.

I have been keeping people alive for so many years I can’t remember what the time before it felt like. But weary as I am, I’m not finished yet.

I lean against the tree, and all the other songbirds and I make quiet, beautiful music together untilthe morning has gone and I realize how hungry I am.

The trek back to the Victor’s Village is long and slow, the weight on my shoulders heavy in a way that is more purpose than pain, and I think maybe now, finally, I can dream of all the people I’ve lost without them shovelling ashes into my mouth.

But that scraping sound follows me, even in my waking hours.

Some part of me must still crave some form of penance because I sprint to the sound, even though my legs are wobbly and my lungs ache. I stop short just before my house, just before the scraggly bushes lining the stone wall, just before the blonde boy crouched in the dirt.

“You’re back,” I whisper, my voice strained, and he turns to me, wipes his dirty hands on his pants.

“Dr. Aurelius wouldn’t let me leave the Capitol until yesterday,” he says, and we stare at each other in curious, contemplative silence, until he gestures to the scraggly bushes swaddled in soil. “I went to the woods this morning and dug them up.” The sinister, saccharine scent hits my nose then. “I thought we could plant them along the side of the house.”

He is still a Capitol mutt, I realize then. Maybe he always will be. Here to torture me, to punish me, to ensure my penance as long as I still breathe. But this is what I wanted, to suffer, to get what I have earned after all my missteps. 

But these are not Snow’s roses. They’re primroses.

“For her,” he finally says, and the anger dissipates, soon taken over by a fresh wave of aching grief.

I nod, because it’s all I can manage, and then rush inside, lock the door behind me. I can still smell the rose even though I burnt it days ago, even though the study door has stayed shut all this time.

I fly through the house like a windstorm, opening every window I find to air the whole place out, to rid myself of that smell once and for all. It will never leave my dreams, not completely, but it doesn’t need to stay in my home any longer.

One the springtime breeze is sweeping through every inch of the house, cleansing it as best it can, I climb in the shower and scrub myself over and over and over until I think maybe I will never smell another rose again, and then I go back downstairs.

Buttercup is patrolling the living room, chirping in the direction of the wide window overlooking the front of the house. He is used to roaming, to leaping up and climbing out and exploring wherever he sees fit, but his legs can’t carry him so far anymore. Neither can mine.

Hit by the weariness all at once, I sink to the floor and he’s at my side in an instant. He presses against my burning legs and I stroke his spine from head to tail-tip until it eases me to sleep, and when I wake the sky is dark and the wind is moaning outside and the house is cold as winter.

I wrap my arms around my knees, anticipating a cold deep-set in my bones, but other than the very tips of my fingers, I am warm. There’s a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and a fire crackling in the hearth, and right next to it, flickering in the firelight, sits Peeta.

“You left all the windows open. I came to make sure you were okay,” he says, almost bashful. Like he’s been caught somewhere he’s not supposed to be. Like he hasn’t spent so many nights in this very house, sharing my bed with me whenever I had the courage to ask.

I realize then that the windows have been shut. That he has shut them, sealed them to protect me from the storm outside, built a fire to keep me warm. To keep me safe. And I feel it, the safety there is in his presence, but I am not satisfied.

“You stopped me,” I croak, and I'm already wavering, tears already threatening to spill.

His brow furrows. “What do you mean?”

“After I shot Coin. The nightlock.” My voice breaks, crushed just like that precious little pill. “I gave you yours, but you wouldn’t let me take mine.”

“I couldn’t. I told you that.” He pauses, gives me a strange, pained half-smile. “Real or not real?”

This wouldn’t be a tampered memory. Peeta was there for that — the real Peeta, not the mutt the Capitol made him into. But he’s making it easier, turning this into a game. He is protecting me even now, because that’s what we do for each other.

“Real,” I whisper.

“And if I was in the same position, you would have stopped me too.”

He’s not asking, but I answer anyway, again. “Real.”

“Because you need me.” He’s closer now, I realize. When did he move? Or was it me? “You’re the only one who needs me, and I need that.”

I’m close enough now to touch his cheek if I reach out, so I do. The rigid angle of his jaw, the soft, tired skin below his eyes.

“But you love Gale,” he whispers, watching me intently. It’s not raw suspicion, like when we first got him back after the hijacking. It’s wary. Gentle caution. Preparation for an answer you might not want to hear, but that you need.

“Not real,” I whisper back. And for all the times he has protected me, kept me safe, I haven’t done the same for him. Not like this. Not for his heart. Not in the way I realize now that he needs me to.

So I press my lips against his, and he lets me, and I know in all of this I’ve done this one thing right. He tastes like bread tossed in the fire and the first dandelion of spring and the hand that covers your nightlock pill because he can’t afford to lose you any more than you can him. He tastes like a warm night on a synthetic jungle beach, and a hunger less familiar than all the different kinds I know. Not hunger that will kill you, but the kind that makes you feel alive.  
  
He doesn’t let me undress. Not me, not him. Not that night, or the next, for several nexts. He lets me kiss him, I let him ask questions, and when the nightmares take hold we take comfort in each other. He reminds me I’m safe now, over and over again until I start to believe it.

One night, after a dream leaves him rigid with fear, his entire body trembling like treetops in the wind while his hands are fisted under the sheets, he asks me to sing. The Meadow Song puts him to sleep that night, and a good verse or two of anything else puts him to sleep in the nights that follow.

And one night, without thinking, I start singing a different song. One I haven’t sung in years, not even in my Training Center days after I put an arrow through Coin’s chest.

_“Down in the valley, the valley so low,  
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.”_

“Why this one?” he asks, brow furrowed, something troubled brewing in his eyes.

“You don’t like it? I can sing something else.”

I’m already flipping through the catalogue in my mind, but still frowning, he says, “No, keep singing.” The downward curve of his mouth is softer now, smoothed out a little, but I can see the mystery thoughts churning in his eyes. “I just haven’t heard that one in a while, is all.”

I readjust my position, sitting up so his head rests in my lap. I card my fingers through his hair and watch his eyes while I sing. He’s staring off at some point in the distance, and I don’t know if he’s trying to figure out his night terrors or the girl sharing his bed, but I leave him the space for either.

_“Roses love sunshine, violets love dew,  
Angels in heaven know I love you.”_

He draws in a slow breath and lets it out in a quiet sigh, letting his eyes drift shut. He’s not asleep, not yet, but he’s getting there. Allowing himself to get there.

_“Give my heart ease, love, give my heart ease,  
Put your arms round me, give my heart ease.”_

His breathing begins to deepen but still he doesn’t sleep. He’s listening, soaking it in, and it makes my insides twist in a frantic way I don’t like. But the rest of it is so peaceful. The sound of his breathing, of my own soft voice, which I’ve grown to like a little more over the last few months. In a warm bed with the person you trust the most.

_“Down in the valley, the valley so low,  
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.”_

I end the song with a kiss between his eyebrows, the same kind he gives me when his sleepy voice lulls me back to sleep, and this seems to release him from whatever ties of consciousness he’s been bound by. He lets out another sleepy sigh and shuffles onto his side, and I slip back under the sheets to take my place next to him.

It takes me longer to fall asleep, one arm slung across his waist and my face pressed against his back, breathing in the scent of him. Clean laundry, stone ovens, spring air, salty skin from whatever woke him up in the first place. But when I do fall asleep, nothing wakes me but the stream of light pushing through the gap in the curtain.

No nightmares. And no Peeta.

I am full of restless energy. I pace my room listlessly, shower, and force some food down my throat, even though my stomach is tumbling inside me.

I jog through the streets, hunting gear slung over my shoulder, and by the time I’ve passed the half-rebuilt market I’m sprinting, fighting to get the buzz out of my bones. I could run through the woods, run far from the bounds of District 12, run all the way to 13 and back. The buzz wouldn’t disappear even then, I know. Because it’s Peeta.

It’s Peeta. It’s all Peeta. It’s always Peeta.

Everything is off today. My mind, my balance, my aim. I’m so lost in my own head that I stumble over the clearest of roots, nearly fall over with every other step, unable to shoot even the laziest of wild geese. It takes me the whole morning and the early hours of the afternoon to shoot a single grouse, and I know it’s the best I’ll manage for the day.

The sun is as warm and low as the heat in my stomach at the thought of coming home to Peeta, at the thought of having a home that belongs to him too. At the thought of what is mine belonging to him.

I remember the day the Capitol cameras returned to District 12 at the very beginning of the Victory Tour. I remember running like I would die if I spent one more moment away from him, falling into the snow with him, kissing him like there wasn’t a soul to see it. It was a show, a playact for our audience. It isn’t a show now.

I sprint home, all my treasures strapped over my shoulder, and burst through the door, ready to see him puttering in the kitchen like he has for the last few weeks, even when Greasy Sae tries to chase him out.

But my home is empty. Not even Buttercup is here to greet me, and the silence punches me in the gut.

I haven’t felt like such an idiot since he confessed his love for me to Caesar, to the Capitol, to anyone who might hear it. There’s a reason he stops me every night from going as far as I want to, from going further than he wants to. Why has it taken me so long to understand this?

The running hits in me all at once, my unsteady, fluttering heartbeat, the undeniable ache in my legs, the sudden stitch in my ribs, just below my heart. I stumble upstairs, shed my clothes, and curl up in the shower. The water is soft and lukewarm as summer rain, and it trickles down my skin like the tears would if I could bear to shed them. Shedding them makes it real. I’m not ready for it to be real.

I have pushed him away for too long. I have tried to lose the boy with the bread for too long. And I have finally gotten my wish, as soon as I’ve realized I want the opposite.

By the time I force myself out of the shower, the sky is soft orange, gorgeous and heartbreaking. I stare out the window while I braid my hair, watching the sun sink lower and lower until it disappears completely, slips from the sky despite the clouds reaching to pull it back up.

My feet are like lead with every downward stair-step, carrying me down the flight of steps, down the hallway, down to the kitchen where I will force myself to eat because Sae will have my skin if I stop eating again, and forcing myself to survive is one of few things I know how to do without thinking.

There are sounds of life from the kitchen — things bumping around, soft footsteps on the tile. Sae has come to make me dinner, or Buttercup is agitated by the delay of his own meal.

“Settle down, you bottomless pit,” I grumble, stepping through the doorway, already reaching for the refrigerator, but someone’s blocking my path.

Peeta.

It takes me a moment to register him, to realize that he’s actually there, that it’s actually him and not just a figment I’ve willed into being for how much I’ve missed him. I’ve only been away from him for a few hours and I’ve _missed_ him.

“I thought you were the cat,” I stammer, a heat brewing in my cheeks that matches the fire in my gut.

“Just me,” he says, and he stares at me so long and so hard I’m sure I will go up in flames, burn to ash right in front of him.

His hair is rumpled on one side, a dash of flour on his forehead, and I haven’t seen his eyes so troubled since he was at war with every single thought in his head. 

“What’s wrong?” I ask, fighting the urge to take his hands in mine. There must be some impulsive twitch of my arm, because he stares at them until I cross them over my chest, standing my ground.

He meets my eyes then, and the odd look on his face is still there, but diminished slightly. As if some of his questions have been answered.

“I’m just trying to figure you out,” he says. I take a step then, one small move forward, and touch his arm. His hand moves to cover mine, and his eyes flicker over my face, like if he stares just long enough he will find answers to all the mystery questions behind his eyes.

“There’s nothing to figure out,” I say, and he laughs.

It’s quiet, a soft rumble in his chest, and there’s a shy, earnest smile that comes with it. “As if that’s ever been true.”

I don’t know which of us moves first, but in seconds we’ve collided, our mouths hungry on each other. My fingers dip under his shirt, trace the hard line of muscle at his stomach, and he draws in a sharp breath.

This is the part where he stops me. Where he takes my hands, his hold gentle but firm, and kisses both of them. Then he’ll kiss my forehead, tell me, “Good night, Katniss,” in that way that is as kind as it is sad, and while he tries to sleep I try to figure out what’s happening inside my head. Why I’m disappointed and restless and angry all at once, why I feel so far away from the boy in my bed, still close enough to touch.

No, not a boy. It's been a long time since we were children.

But we are not in the bed we share without ever deciding so out loud, and night has not completely closed in on us yet, and he doesn’t stop me. Instead he puts his hand on mine, holding my fingers tightly but not moving, and then I’m worried.

“Peeta?” I pull away from him, stare at him with wide eyes, use my free hand to brush some hair out of his eyes, brush the dash of flour from his cheek. _Is this okay?_ I’m about to say it out loud but he hears it, some part of him does, because his eyes stop looking so scared and he actually smiles. Breathless and nervous, schoolboyish like those first kisses in the arena, just enough to make me weak, and then he nods.

I practically tear his shirt off then, spurned so many times now that I’m half-convinced he’ll change his mind if I give him the chance to, and as soon as he’s free of it his mouth returns to mine, hot and hungry and breathless.

His skin is warm beneath my hands, and his hands are warm against my stomach as he pushes my own shirt up and away from my chest. I’m pressed against him as if detaching myself from him will make me lose him forever, and when I shed my shirt I half wish I was wearing one of the lacy little things Cinna brought to this house so many months ago.

The kisses down my neck are hot, urgent, staggered between his fervent, whispered words. “You’re so beautiful,” he tells me, trailing past my collarbone, lips wandering closer and closer to the space between my breasts. I wrap my arms tight around his neck, the rise and fall of my chest hard and heavy, and I’m somewhere between wanting nothing else but to feel those words against my skin and so dizzy I’m sure I’ll collapse without him to hold onto.

It’s a language we share without knowing, the way he scoops me up and wraps his arms around me, the way I jump to meet him and cinch my legs around his waist. He carries me up the stairs, up the hall, through our bedroom door, and we fall to the mattress together, his fingers never slipping away from my skin.

I have touched him so many times and so many ways over the last year and a half, but this is new, this is unchartered territory, and it is the only unknown I have ever trusted because it is him. Peeta.

Friend. Lover. Victor. Enemy. Fiance. Target. Mutt. Neighbour. Hunter. Tribute. Ally. There are so many words to describe us, what we are, what we aren’t, what we have been, and no word succinct or complex enough to sum it up completely. But I don’t need a word for what exists between Peeta and I.

All I need is this, is him. This is enough. He is enough.

We peel the rest of our clothes off, we give each other enough kisses to make up for all the time we’ve lost along the way, and here there is nothing but nice and good and kind and unbroken. He makes me something lovely, something brand new in his hands, beneath his lips, between these sheets that have never tangled us quite like this.

And I’ve never let his name slip from my mouth quite like this, not when I decided I would survive the games with him by my side, not when I thought I lost him in the second arena, not every moment since that I’ve tried to make sure he’d come back to me in one piece. There is no doubt or fear, nothing at all besides him and the sound of my name on his own laboured lips, and then there is no sound but our heavy breathing, our lazy parting kisses, our content in this space that is ours.

He holds me the same way he’s always held me, but it feels closer now, and I’m about to ask him what exactly he was trying to figure out earlier, what it is he seems so much more sure of now. But he speaks first.

“You love me,” he whispers, his lips brushing across my shoulder, and I am frozen in his arms.

There’s a cold drop in my stomach like a shock of ice water, like I’ve been found out, like my hiding place has burnt to the ground and there’s nothing left to keep me safe. But I am safe, here in Peeta’s arms, next to the boy who brings bread and springtime and the softest orange sunset skies I’ve ever seen. He is safe, he is safety, he is all the warmth in the world.

I roll over to face him, and his eyes are gentle, searching, roving over my features while he waits my answer. “Real or not real?”

And of everything we’ve seen in the arenas, in our district, in the streets of the Capitol, this is the most frightening of them all to face. He and his questions are the most frightening to face. But he is noble and kind and the bravest person I’ve ever known, and it’s my turn to be brave for him.

So I press my forehead against his, trace his jaw with my fingertips, and whisper, “Real,” with all the conviction in the world. And when he kisses me I’m warm to my toes, all the cold of my fear dissipated. 

There is only him.


	15. New Year's Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Don’t read the last page  
>  Cause I’ll stay when you’re lost and I’m scared and you’re turning away  
> I want your midnights  
> But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day._

**New Year’s Day**

I have always been content in small company. I never knew a family larger than four, I never ventured into the woods with anyone but my one hunting partner, I never intended to survive the Games with someone else next to me. I’m at peace with the quiet in our sometimes too-large home, but Peeta never completely is.

He knew a big rowdy family, he knew as many friends as a child could make in a place like 12, he knew most of the district in their comings and goings from the bakery alone. Who would show the moment the door opened for the first steaming loaves of the day, who would drop by just to chat with Mr. Mellark or ogle one of the baker’s boys, who would buy bulk at full price if they kept the shop open for just five minutes extra.

He knew busy and chaos and mess then, and he misses it now.

Unlike Peeta, the war has made me meticulous about mess. It reminds me of grief so feral and uncontrollable that nothing can be maintained, and Dr. Aurelius likes to remind me that fixations like that are unhealthy, but I like to ignore him just as much. Peeta humours me, at least, carefully tidying the house with me room-by-room on our way to bed each night, but even he slips up now and then.

My blood pressure skyrockets when I come home to see Peeta and the rest of the kitchen coated head-to-toe in flour, but the pot pie is delicious.

“My family always ate dinner together,” he tells me, wiping the counters until they sparkle while I scrub the dishes. “We cooked together, ate together, cleaned together. Every night.”

“Even after the Games?”

“Yeah.” I look over my shoulder at him, and I’m unprepared for the sadness in his eyes, not well-hidden enough by his optimist’s smile. “Not even a victor is exempt from family dinner, you know.”

And I understand the sadness that trickles in, even with the bitterness that comes with a cruel mother, a meek father, brothers who never cleaned the most important messes. An imperfect family is better than none at all.

I decide that night that Peeta will have his imperfect family, his big dinners. I invite Sae and her granddaughter Willow to repay them for all they’d done those first few months, and after pounding on Haymitch’s door so long and hard I almost split my knuckles, I manage to lock him down in a once-a-week contract. Delly, however, requires no such strong-arming.

“We don’t have to do this every week,” Peeta says one night, just after our guests have left. I’ve paused my efforts on a liquor stain on the good tablecloth, Peeta his dishes, so we can watch Delly half-guide, half-carry a drunk Haymitch down the road to his goose-infested house.

“I know.” I smile at him, and return to my stain-removing. This is a long-drawn discussion over many nights, Peeta knowing well my weariness of people, me knowing well his need to have them around. My stubbornness has not yet yielded, nor his.

He comes up behind me, pulls the cloth from my hands, and loops his arms around my waist. “You know,” he says, pressing his lips to the side of my neck, “if we keep this up I’m gonna want a party eventually.”

I laugh, give him a little shove and then a kiss to make it better, and this is where it ends for the night. But in the weeks that come, our dinner group starts to grow.

After Delly’s face goes beet-red hearing his name one night, Peeta invites Thom to join us. Thom invites Bristel, Bristel invites Leevy when she finally migrates back from 13, and another chair is added to the dining room each month.

Our circle grows, but there are no parties. Not when Annie has her son in 4, not when the seeded ground of 12 has its first harvest, not even when Effie pays us a visit all the way from the Capitol.

There are no parties in our home. Certainly not the week after Effie returns to the city, when all I do is cry after I find Peeta’s pearl has gone missing. I cry when I first realize it’s gone. I cry again when we scour the house for a day and still find nothing. I cry even harder at the end of the week when Peeta gets on one knee with a tiny velvet box from a jeweller friend of Effie’s, and the iridescent stone is returned to me, set in a delicate golden band.

It warrants a party, but it’s a party behind closed doors, and Peeta is the only one invited.

There’s no party for our wedding, either. My mother visits 12 for the first time since it was bombed, hikes to the lake with my arm in hers, alters her old white dress to fit my frame. Thom clutches Delly’s hand while she blubbers incoherently, Haymitch pretends he only showed up for the liquor, and we all pretend not to notice the tears he sheds when I promise Peeta for better or worse.

We get congratulatory letters from all over Panem: Effie, Annie, Cressida. Johanna sends a separate letter for each of us, and though mine is pleasant but unremarkable, Peeta’s leaves some kind of impression. It’s only after I catch the last line — _Be sure to write back when you knock her up! Love, J_ — that I understand his bright red cheeks.

Peeta never does write her back, nor does he answer the phone when she calls, but he’s never the one she calls for anyway.

The phone rings the day after a party of Johanna’s so extravagant and debaucherous that half the district showed, while the other half put in a formal complaint. “All I’m saying is there might be a new generation of peacekeepers brewing,” she grumbles over the phone.

“There’s no one to blame but you,” I tell her while Peeta laughs from the kitchen.

“My parties wouldn’t be like that,” he tells me that night, when dinner is over and our family has left for their beds and there’s only him and I left in our big, quiet home. “Nice and peaceful. No peacekeepers necessary.”

“I don’t think it counts as a party if it’s peaceful,” I point out. “Just ask Johanna.”

The next morning brings us the first snowfall of winter, and a letter from Annie. 

As always, there’s a picture of Ronan in the envelope. He is bright-eyed and curly-haired, with a gap-toothed grin and a fistful of seagrass in his tiny hands. He looks so much like his father than it knocks the air from my lungs for a moment, and I can’t bear to look at Peeta’s face when I pass the photo to him.

He draws in a shaky breath, squeezes my shoulder, gets to his feet, and the study door clicks behind him a few moments later. The mahogany door muffles his words, but the low, steady hum of his voice is still there. He always calls Annie after a letter.

I finish reading alone, hold in my tears so they don’t smudge Annie’s delicate cursive. Her son is quiet and kind and curious, all the sides of Finnick you wouldn’t have seen if you knew him only from his fishing-net costumes and sugar cubes, and he has so many questions. About the world, about the war, about the photo of his mother and a man he’s never met that always makes her a little teary. And you wouldn’t see it if you knew Annie only from her on-camera hysterics, her quiet, rapid mumbling, the gentle press of her hands over her ears, but she is the most courageous person I’ve ever known.

She ends the letter asking about the book. Our book, built of Peeta’s sketches and my careful handwriting and all the knowledge we can gather to honour those we’ve lost. Finnick’s pages were some of the first, and when I open the study door, they’re the ones open on the desk before Peeta.

He lifts his eyes, and they’re red-rimmed, full of equal parts sorrow and delight, and I try not to notice the way he so delicately holds the photo of Finnick’s son. It’s as unavoidable as the ache that kicks in my chest, the nervous energy that starts to worm through my skin whenever I fear he’s about to bring up children.

It’s another long-drawn discussion between us, each of us as loving and stubborn as ever while keeping in our opposite corners. And it’s a discussion I’m too scared to partake in right now, when emotions are high and all I can think of is the sunshine in that little boy’s smile and the pain in the eyes of the man I love.

“Can I talk to her?” I whisper, pointing to the receiver held to his ear.

He blinks a few times, then nods, sets the phone down on the desk. He moves to slide past me, maybe to read the letter himself, but I stop him on his way out, hold him tight and close until his arms squeeze around me.

I release him with a stroke of his cheek, one more gentle kiss, and when he shuts the door behind him I lift the receiver to my face.

“Hello, Katniss.” Annie’s voice is surprised but warm over the phone.

“Hi,” is all I say. The only calls I take are the ones I can’t escape from. My mother, Dr. Aurelius, Johanna. I don’t know how to do this, how to ask for help, how to make good things happen. 

There are loose photos all over the pages of the book, all of Ronan. We stitched a little folder onto one of Finnick's pages after Annie sent us the first photo of her newborn, and with every letter there’s been one more picture to safekeep there. Peeta must have been going over them with her on the phone, cooing over his transition from helpless newborn to toddling adventurer, weeping over the preciousness and fragility of life.

I scoop the photos up carefully and tuck them back in their folder, and it’s Finnick’s face I’m staring at when I draw in a deep breath and ask, “How would you and Ronan like to spend New Year’s in 12?”

By the time we’ve hammered out the details, said our farewells, and I’ve opened the study door, Peeta’s eyes are dry but concerned.

“Is everything okay?” he asks immediately, and I nod, fighting to maintain my composure.

“I wanted Annie and Ronan to be the first I invite over for our New Year’s Eve party. The rest of the guest list is up to you.” I set a notepad and pen in his lap, declare I’ll be out hunting, and by the time I reach the door it’s just begun to sink in for him.

The last thing I see before I step outside is the smile start to crawl up his face.

The next few weeks are a flurry of planning and pre-party excitement, and it’s a relief that Delly’s in town and my mother and Effie are only a phone call away, because I don’t have the stamina for this. The calls, the train schedules, the arrangements of who will stay where and for how long.

But it’s all worth it to see Peeta’s glowing face the day Annie arrives, to hear little Ronan cry with delight when he’s tossed in the air by Uncle Peeta.

We send the pair of them off to bake cookies or play in the snow or look at the market lights, and when they’re gone Annie and I start decorating.

After all my time being styled in the Capitol, I expect to be better at making things pretty, but Annie is the true artist of our duo. In an hour she has garlands twisting high along the walls, ribbon-tied sprigs of rosemary and mistletoe dangling from the ceiling so the place smells as merry as it looks. She reminds me of Madge, delicate but decisive, so attuned to lovely things it’s no wonder she’s so well-loved.

When Peeta returns, hand-in-hand with Ronan, rosy-cheeked and dusted with powdery snow, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen his eyes brighter. Not even when the rest of the guest list files in.

Effie and Cressida and Pollux and some of their filmmaker friends from the Capitol. Sae and Willow and Haymitch, the latter shockingly sober but still with a ribbon-tied bottle of liquor in his hand. Delly and Thom from town, with Bristel and some of the other mine-workers. And finally Johanna, with an even bigger bottle than Haymitch, and a smile so devious it’s unmistakable.

She grabs me by the cheeks, gives me a big kiss on the mouth, and then throws her hands in the air. “The party has officially begun!” she declares, looping an arm around my shoulder and ushering me into my own living room, alight with holiday decor and far more faces than these walls have ever held before.

I stick near Peeta or Annie most of the night, anchoring myself to the people I can trust to provide some semblance of peace, and when Ronan starts to tug on Annie’s hand, asking for the bathroom, I volunteer in a heartbeat.

“You go on with Katniss,” Annie says, giving him a little pat on the back, and after he blinks at me a few times with those big sea-green eyes, he wraps his tiny hand around mine and lets me lead him upstairs.

When he comes back out, chubby fingers still dripping with soapy water, he stares nervously down the staircase while I towel off his hands. “A little too loud down there?” I ask, squatting on the ground to stay on his level.

He nods shyly and folds his now-dry hands together, staring at the floor while I hang the towel.

I smile at him, smooth one of his curls back on his forehead. “Don’t tell anyone, but I like it better up here, too,” I whisper conspiratorially, and the dimples spring up on his cheeks.

I figure there’s a lot for a kid to explore up here, so I let him take my hand again, but this time he takes the lead. He wanders to mine and Peeta’s room and pokes through some of the frilly, fancy things in my closet. He finds Peeta’s art studio and runs his fingers across stretches of canvas, peers into the paint trays at all the vivid colours. But he pauses at the study door, as if he can feel it in his bones that something important lies beyond it, and looks up at me in silent question.

“You’re allowed,” I tell him with a little squeeze of his hand, and I hold the door open for him.

He beelines for the shelf where we stash the most important book in our collection, and I pull it down for him, set it on the desk. He’s too short to reach the chair himself, and I can only imagine the damper it’ll put on the party if he whacks his forehead on the lip of the desk trying to read by himself, so on a foreign impulse I scoop him up in my arms and sit him on my legs.

None of the shyness I anticipate from him is there when he settles in on my lap, but this is a child who hasn’t yet learned that the world might be cruel to him. He’s the first of many to come, I realize, a whole generation of children who won’t have to fear Capitol horrors for themselves, for their siblings, for their friends, for their own future children. Something precious and delicate and innocent, something that must be protected at all costs, and it’s instinct then that has me draw him in a little closer, hold him tighter against my chest.

His tiny hands heave the leather-bound book open, and and after a few flips of the pages he lands on Finnick, and for a few long moments we just stare at his portrait.

“What’s that?” he finally asks, prodding the chunks of text scrawled intermittently across the pages. I read the passages aloud to him and he follows along with one chubby little finger until we’ve read his father’s pages top to bottom, and then he runs his hand over the envelope stitched into the side and asks again, “What’s that?”

“That’s you,” I tell him, unveiling the collection of photos for him to sift through. “He keeps all your pictures, you know.”

He smiles, and I doubt he really understands the meaning of any of this, but he’s happy to point back and forth between the bright green eyes they share, their wild, tumbling locks, and who am I to deny a child’s happiness? For him, this is enough.

One by one, we place the pictures back into their envelope, and I let him seal it himself, squishing down on the sticky corner with both hands and all his toddler might. And it seems like this might be the end of his perusal, but it feels wrong to shut the book quite yet, to act like Finnick’s is a story that is so far gone already.

So I tell his son, just in case he needs to hear it, “He loved you and your mom more than anything in the whole world.” I give him a little squeeze, bring him a little closer to my chest. “Do you know that?”

He nods, wise and knowing even at three, and says, “Mommy always says so.” He presses three little fingers to his mouth, and then touches Finnick’s portrait one more time, and I’m so caught by this tiny gesture from this even tinier human that I jump when the door opens again.

“What are you guys doing?” Peeta asks, seeing me first, then Finnick Jr, and then everything else all at once. The way he’s nestled in my lap, my arm looped around his little body for security, the book laid out on the desk, the page it’s flipped to.

His face softens so quickly I’m sure he’s about to start crying, and my first impulse is to jump to his defence, to take him up in my arms and protect him from all the hurt that’s churning through his head, but there’s no suffering in his eyes. Just something distant, peaceful, happy.

“Visiting Daddy,” Ronan chirps, splaying a hand out on the open page and smiling up at Peeta. And a quiet, bitter part of me could resent the way this child’s smile has soaked up all of Peeta’s attention in an instant, but if I have to share Peeta with anyone, even for just a while, I think this one will be the easiest to yield to. 

“I bet that’s the best gift he’s ever gotten,” Peeta says, gentle and sad and sweet and warm, and then he lifts his eyes to me. “It’s almost midnight. You guys wanna join us for the last hoorah?”

I bounce Ronan on my knees, peering in at his smiling face. “What do you say?”

And he nods with all the bravery in the world, looking more like his father than ever when he picks up my hand again and says, “Okay."

Downstairs, Annie scoops her son up like she hasn’t seen him in years, and Peeta watches them and I watch Peeta and I know that he’s content in these stolen moments but also that there are some happinesses that shouldn’t be denied, and there are so many things churning through my mind to be sifted through, and then the countdown begins.

Johanna is the ringleader, of course, hollering the first, “ _Ten_!” and in an instant everyone joins in with her. 

“ _Nine!_ ”

I’ve had Peeta to myself for years now, and I’m sure I could keep him to myself for decades longer and still never be satisfied by anything less than forever. 

“ _Eight_!”

But he will be by my side for every toast and every heartache and everything in between. 

“ _Seven_!”

He will hold me the way he always has when the nightmares come crawling, and he always will, and not even the Capitol could take that away from us, no matter how hard they tried.

“ _Six_!”

I think of the only other New Year that really sticks in my mind, winter in the Hob at Greasy Sae’s counter, me and Gale and Darius.

“ _Five_!”

I think of all of us, all the things we’ve lost.

“ _Four_!”

Sae lost her corner of the Hob. I lost Prim. Gale lost me. Darius lost his chance at a midnight kiss, and then his tongue, and then his life.

“ _Three_!”

But there’s none of that danger looming over our necks now, no fear of another round of Games or a new Snow to suffocate us.

“ _Two_!”

And there are still so many unexpected things in the world, but not all of them are terrible, and I’m beginning to think that sharing Peeta might not be either.

“ _One_!”

Annie spins Ronan in her arms and gives him a flurry of little kisses met with maniacal, joyful giggles. Sae plants a kiss on a delighted Willow’s temple, Effie gives Haymitch one of her posh Capitol cheek kisses, Cressida throws an arm around Pollux’s shoulder and gives him a hearty comrade’s smooch. Thom and Delly share something sweet and chaste in the corner that turns Delly’s cheeks holly-red anyway. Johanna has Bristel up against the wall in a way that is far too primal and not nearly family-friendly enough to be referred to as a kiss.

But they’re all background noise for the way Peeta wraps me up in his arms and presses his lips to mine, like there wouldn’t be any less bliss in this home or in this moment if he’d shared his midnight with only me. And all I can think as Annie totes Ronan upstairs for a long-delayed bedtime and Peeta and I bid farewell to our guests with our fingers entwined is how lucky I am to be the one to share all his midnights.

Once the house is empty except for us and Annie and Ronan, already asleep in the guest room, we take in the scene around us. Empty glasses all over the living area, streamers and garland half-torn from the wall, a white-liquor puddle settled into the rug, a mysterious dusting of glitter by the door.

And all of a sudden the eve has left, the new year come to replace it, and the magic of it all is gone in an instant.

I gesture to all the tiny messes filling our home now, and give Peeta an imploring look. “How much do you want to bet Johanna did this singlehandedly?”

He laughs, wraps his arms around me, and gives me a kiss on the cheek. But he is sheepish, embarrassed, hiding his face in the crook of my neck. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles into my skin, his voice a tired rasp, and I know his face is bright pink in his hiding place. “I didn’t realize how much of a mess there was.”

I turn to face him, take his hands in mine, tell him, “Mess is fine,” and lean up to kiss him.

He is confused now, concerned, watching me with care. Always so careful, so kind, never one to jump headfirst into anything besides loving me. And it’s so rare that I get to surprise him with happy things that I start to smile, something that was lost for so long but hasn’t been so rare for a few years now.

The loss will always remain, will always be a broken part of me, but there will always be mess. You can’t survive the things we’ve lived through without it. But Peeta will always be there to clean up all the tiniest pieces, to put them back together no matter how long it takes, to make all the broken things feel whole again.

And I’ve never felt anything greater than watching a broken part of him become whole when I hold him close and whisper, “Let’s have a family.”

_**fin.** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end! Thank you so much to everyone who's taken the time to leave a comment, kudos, bookmark, or even just give this a read. This has been so much fun to write and the fact that other people enjoyed it too warms my heart. :) Big shoutout to Taylor for never failing to write music that completely curb-stomps my heart, and another shoutout to everyone who's let me get away with doing a concept album fic! I cherish your sacrifice and I look forward to the next one ;).
> 
> See ya next time! <3


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